145. Gold-Band Alabastron

Condition

Mended. Small part of the upper edge of the body is missing and was replaced with some fill. The original neck and rim are also missing and were replaced with that of a ribbon flask. The inner lining of glass is slightly visible in the break near the bottom of the vessel.

Description

Alabastron with removable neck and rim piece. The rim is flaring, almost horizontal, with ground tip, and the neck is cylindrical, covered in the interior with a whitish incrustation. It is made of stripes of white, greenish, purple, light blue, and greenish—with gold flakes—glass. Originally from a free-blown gold-band flask (cf. cat. 146). The original necks of alabastra are very thin, with broad horizontal rim, and are usually monochrome.

At the top, the body ends in a horizontal, flat edge; everted conical body with straight walls tapering toward the rim; convex pointed bottom. The vessel is made from five parallel wavy lengths of canes set vertically on the body. The canes (0.1 cm thick) are set on a dark blue layer (0.5 cm thick) in the following order: turquoise (actually an opaque white layer under a translucent greenish layer that appears turquoise by transmitting the color of the underlying dark blue layer of the body); amber-color (appearing black) encasing a thin white trail; blue encasing a thin white trail; purple encasing a thin white trail; and a gold-glass band comprising greenish glass with gold flakes in it. This pattern is repeated three times. The interior of the body is smooth and the colors are clearly visible.

Comments and Comparanda

The gold-band technique involves the use of bands with a gold foil encased in transparent glass next to other, colorful bands, for the formation of vessels through rod-forming, core-forming, slumping, and blowing (Cesarin 2019, pp. 45–58).

The use of colorless glass to cover gold foils first appeared in early fourth-century BCE Macedonia and Thessaly for the decoration of shallow, lidded bowls and finger rings (Ignatiadou 2003, pp. 4–7; Ignatiadou 2017, pp. 61–67). This technique reappeared in the late third–second centuries BCE with sandwich gold-glass vessels attributed to Alexandria (Harden 1968, pp. 21–47).

Proper gold-band glass objects form one of the rarest groups of Hellenistic and Roman glass objects. Hellenistic gold-band objects include mainly alabastra, some bowls, one skyphos, and a few beads, gems, and inlays. They were produced in the eastern Mediterranean, possibly in or around Alexandria, between the second and the mid-first centuries BCE. Roman gold-band glass products, datable between the last quarter of the first century BCE and the beginning of the first century CE, are mainly containers for cosmetics and ointments, pyxides, and flasks; a smaller group consists of sumptuous tableware items, bowls, and one patera (Cesarin 2019). The largest number is found in Italy, where they were most likely produced, likely in Aquileia and possibly elsewhere in Italy too.

From the third century CE and mainly during the fourth century, gold-glass reappears in various groups of vessels, the most numerous one known as “fonti d’oro.” They are characterized by the use of gold or gilded threads and the protection of the gold leaf with glass roundels and later with an entire layer of glass. It has been proposed that they were produced in Italy, Rhineland, and the eastern Mediterranean (Whitehouse 1996, p. 10; von Saldern 2004, pp. 352–361; Howells 2015).

Gold-band alabastra were introduced in the first century BCE, and if they were actually used, they were most probably used for holding scented oils and perfumes. This particular example belongs to a more numerous subgroup of these rare alabastra, which are smaller, with wider body and more numerous and narrower colored bands that occasionally overlap (Grose 1989, p. 196; Cesarin 2019, pp. 32–35). On the gold-band glass technique, see Cesarin 2019, and especially on Roman gold-band glass techniques pp. 45–70. For direct comparanda, see Oliver 1967, pp. 20–23, group B; Grose 1989, pp. 196–197, 208, nos. 225–226; Dusenbery 1967, p. 38, no. 8, fig. 9; Filarska 1952, p. 73, plate 6.5, no. 31; Tatton-Brown and Andrews 1991, p. 57, fig. 66 center. For an overview of all published examples, see Cesarin 2019, pp. 133–147, nos. H1–H43, plates I–IV.

Provenance

1600s, Barberini Collection (Rome, Italy); by 1914, Giorgio Sangiorgi, Italian, 1886–1965 (Rome, Italy); by 1974–1988, Erwin Oppenländer, 1901–1988 (Waiblingen, Germany), by inheritance to his son, Gert Oppenländer, 1988; 1988–2003, Gert Oppenländer (Waiblingen, Germany), sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003

Bibliography

Sangiorgi 1914, no. 303, plate XXXIX.

Oliver 1967, p. 21, no. 25.

von Saldern et al. 1974, p. 104, no. 270; p. 102, plate no. 270.

Wight 2011, pp. 42, 50, fig. 29.

Exhibitions

Molten Color: Glassmaking in Antiquity (Malibu, 2005–2006; 2007)

Gläser der Antike: Sammlung Erwin Oppenländer (Hamburg and Cologne, 1974–1975)