535. Discoid Mosaic Face Bead

Condition

Fully preserved; surface weathered and cracked.

Description

Perforated section of a cylindrical mosaic cane, forming a flat, disk-shaped bead. The string hole cuts the cane horizontally behind the face.

A female face is represented, with almond-shaped eyes, curved eyebrows, straight nose, and oval, slightly parted red lips. A thin band, around the face to behind the ears, renders the hair. Eleven strands form a sparse fringe on the forehead, possibly representing snake heads, a feature that would identify the depicted female as Medusa. The facial features and the hair are rendered in dark-colored glass, seemingly black. A cobalt blue band sits under the chin. The face is set in a red and a green layer of glass.

Comments and Comparanda

Mosaic face beads appear in the first century CE, either as globular beads with a row of faces at the greatest diameter or as flat, round, or square beads. Flat face beads, square in cross section, require only one floret, as opposed to the spherical ones, which can accommodate between two and eight, with most having four faces in a single row spanning the mid-section of the bead, usually arranged in alternating pattern with florets with geometrical motifs (Selling type I; for an overview, see Stout 1985, pp. 22–29, map 1, appendix I; Stout 1986, pp. 58–59; Liu 2008). The face beads were not necessarily produced in the same workshops where the mosaic canes were produced. The canes, intact or cut into florets, may have been sold to other workshops, operating either nearby or farther afield. Mosaic glass quite often is ascribed to Alexandrian or other Egyptian workshops, but no glass workshops for this kind of product have been found, so this hypothesis remains unproven.

The beads are known in archaeologically dated contexts from Meroë-Nubia to Rome, Herculaneum, the Black Sea coast, and the Baltic region. Most of the beads have a schematic rendering of the face, in which the Gorgon has been identified due to the dentil-like projections that frame the upper part of the face, schematically depicting snakes. A few other beads have a more naturalistic presentation of the face, with longer hair and a necklace around the neck, like those found in Meroë, the Black Sea coast, and Poland, and the one kept in the Corning Museum of Glass (Dunham 1957, numbers 21-3-57b, 21-12-129b2, and 21-12-130d, figs. 80, 89, plate LXVII; Kazimierczak 1980; Alekseeva 1982, pp. 36, 40, color plate 48, no. 33; Goldstein 1979, pp. 274–275, no. 822). In the Corning Museum of Glass there is also a double-convex glass mosaic patella made of rhomboid florets, among which are interspersed four florets of this type of face cane (Goldstein 1979, pp. 186–187, no. 497). Two fragments of mosaic glass once in the Gréau collection also contained face canes (Froehner 1903, p. 119, plate 133.17, 19, no. 828).

In the fourth century CE there is a reappearance of face and checker mosaic beads (see comments on cat. 537), but significantly larger and with some differences in the rendering of the motifs. They are quite rare and are found exclusively north of the Alps. These later (fourth- and fifth-century) checker beads have three registers of designs, occasionally completed with florets of star-shaped motifs. New types of faces appear, with helmet and different hairstyle. It has been proposed that they are Constantinian and that they were presented either to northerners serving in the imperial guard or to chieftains, in return for their military assistance (Selling type II; see Stout 1985, pp. 30–46; Stout 1986, p. 60).

For comparanda from various collections, see Goldstein 1979, p. 274, no. 820; Alekseeva 1982, pp. 36, 40, color plate 48, nos. 33–42; Rütti 1988, pp. 91, 195, nos. 1905–1907, plate 26, color plate 31; Nenna 1993, pp. 49–50, fig. 3b; Stern and Schlick-Nolte 1994, pp. 414–415; Spaer 2001, p. 124, nos. 207–208, plate 16; Bianchi 2002, pp. 149–150, EG-34bis e–h.

Provenance

1978, Ira Goldberg; Mark Goldberg and Larry Goldberg (Beverly Hills, California), donated to the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1978

Bibliography

Unpublished

Exhibitions

None