Condition
Mended and filled. Iridescence and area with incrustation.
Description
Cracked-off, ground rim; conical body; flat bottom. The body is covered with a mold-blown, raised honeycomb pattern of nine rows of embossed oval cells, framed by a smooth band below the rim and another near the bottom, 1.5 cm wide. On the bottom are two raised concentric circles around a central boss.
Comments and Comparanda
This beaker, on the basis of the body shape, is assigned to a relatively well-represented group of mold-blown conical beakers dated to the first century (Isings, Clasina. 1957. Roman Glass from Dated Finds. Groningen: Wolters., pp. 45–46, form 31; Stern, Eva Marianne. 1995. The Toledo Museum of Art. Roman Mold-Blown Glass: The First through Sixth Centuries. Rome: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider., pp. 103–107, nos. 8–10). A very similar beaker with raised almond-shaped bosses was found in Pompeii (Scatozza Höricht, Lucia Amalia. 1995. I vetri romani di Ercolano. Cataloghi. Rome: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider., p. 82, fig. 16c). With regard to the decoration, it is comparable with a truncated conical beaker with pronounced shoulder (MCT VIII) with embossed diamond-shaped bosses, which is ascribed to an eastern Mediterranean production area and dated to the middle to second half of the first century CE (Stern, Eva Marianne. 1995. The Toledo Museum of Art. Roman Mold-Blown Glass: The First through Sixth Centuries. Rome: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider., pp. 110–111, no. 12). The decoration is also comparable with a shorter beaker in the Corning Museum of Glass (Whitehouse, David B. 2001. Roman Glass in the Corning Museum of Glass, vol. 2. Corning, NY: Corning Museum of Glass., p. 30, no. 497). Marianne Stern (Stern, Eva Marianne. 1995. The Toledo Museum of Art. Roman Mold-Blown Glass: The First through Sixth Centuries. Rome: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider., p. 111) has proposed that these vessels imitate facet-cut gems, being glass imitations of pocula gemmata, gold and silver cups decorated with gems (Hilgers, Werner. 1969. Lateinische Gefassnamen: Bezeichnungen, Funktion und Form römischer Gefäße nach den antiken Schriftquellen. Düsseldorf: Rheinland-Verlag., p. 261, s.v. “poculum”).
Provenance
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
Saldern von, Axel, Birgit Nolte, Peter La Baume, and Thea Elisabeth Haevernick. 1974. Gläser der Antike. Sammlung Erwin Oppenländer. Mainz: von Zabern., p. 167, no. 458.
Exhibitions
Molten Color: Glassmaking in Antiquity (Malibu, 2009–2010)
Gläser der Antike: Sammlung Erwin Oppenländer (Hamburg and Cologne, 1974–1975)