362. Double-Handled Flask / Amphoriskos

Condition

Mended; covered by beige weathering and iridescence.

Description

In-folded tubular rim; flaring mouth; short, wide neck; squat, globular body resting on a flat bottom. Two coil handles applied on the shoulders and ending on the rim, forming a small protruding tab. The remaining end of the coil was stretched, bent, and attached along the handle.

The vessel is decorated with a hatched and flattened thread of glass applied in a zigzag pattern, bending 15 times all around the body, from the height of the handles to the bottom. The relief rendering of the surface of the decorative thread ascribes the vessel to the group with snake-thread decoration.

Comments and Comparanda

Free-blown, glass amphoriskoi with wide neck and mouth and taller, ovular body appear in the middle of the first century CE, and they continue to circulate until the early second century (Isings 1957, pp. 32–34, form 15; Fünfschilling 2015, p. 436, form AR 165). This squatter version should be dated, on the basis of the snake-thread decoration, to the third or even fourth century CE. For the distribution and dates of snake-thread decoration, see comments on cat. 361.

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

von Saldern et al. 1974, p. 230, no. 675.

Exhibitions

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