495. Statuette of a Snake

Condition

Large parts are restored. Iridescence and pitting on glass sections. Stress marks on the underside.

Description

Free-formed mosaic glass snake made up of sections of glass. Curvilinear body of a snake, hemispherical in cross section, underside flat but uneven. Yellow marvered trails were applied on the body (which may be modern) to represent the scales. The head in its current condition is in profile and is made of dark blue canes embedded in opaque white glass, with a section of axially cut opaque white for the mouth and a section of black for the pupil of the eye.

Comments and Comparanda

This is a rare surviving product of modeled Roman glass, consisting of colored threads marvered into a colorless or lightly colored matrix and tooled into a serpentine, wavy shape. In its original form it showed the lozenge-shaped head of the reptile from above, as the rest of the body is presented. The single fully preserved known example (Miho Museum 2001, p. 96, no. 128 [A. Yoko]: H. 13, W. 10.6 cm, reddish brown glass wrapped in white and pale blue cords of glass) has its body curling into two large folds, assuming an approximately figure eight–shaped form that is evident in other partly preserved examples (Corning 1962, p. 8, fig. 5; Goldstein 1979, pp. 212–213, nos. 601–604; Grose 1989, pp. 359, 372, nos. 678–680; also, New Orleans Museum of Art 69.79, illustrated in Grose 1989, p. 359, fig. 174). Finally, six partly preserved examples, possibly included among the previously mentioned examples, were part of the Collection Julien Gréau, bought by Pierpont Morgan and donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Froehner 1903, plate LXXI, nos. 10–15).

The exact use is not known, but the flat underside indicates that it was or could have been a decorative inlay in furniture or an architectural element. It seems logical to connect this statuette with depictions of Agathodaimon, a lesser god in the form of a benevolent serpent. In urban contexts, it appears as a household god, protector of the home in which it was worshiped. Agathodaimon in different contexts was a guarantor of agrarian fertility (LIMC I, pp. 277–282, s.v. “Agathodaimon” by F. Dunand). For a relief snake in the wall of a lararium in a Pompeian house in Regio IX that predates the Vesuvian eruption of 79 CE, see Curuz 2023.

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. 123, no. 331.

Wight 2011, pp. 103, 110, fig. 78.

Exhibitions

Molten Color: Glassmaking in Antiquity (Malibu, 2005–2006; 2007; 2009–2010)

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