550. Head Pendant

Condition

Surface with layer of weathering in different areas.

Description

Dark blue, appearing black, almost cylindrical, rod-formed pendant in the shape of a bearded male head. The face is made of an oval mass of white glass. On it are applied the eyebrows, the eyes, and the nose. The eyes are made of a blue disk over which is a slightly smaller white disk, and a smaller disk of dark blue glass renders the pupil. The eyebrows and the nose are made of a single applied, curving thread of glass. The end of the nose is a tiny yellow bead. Lips are rendered with a disk of yellowish glass pressed in the middle to form the mouth. The elongated beard was made of five coils of amber-colored glass (the first from the right is not preserved). On each side of the face are four yellow beads in a line. The ears are not indicated. Suspension loop, if it existed, is covered by the gold attachment. The back side of the pendant is notably shorter and the rod hole very wide.

This is displayed as the central pendant of a necklace of Etruscan golden beads. It is attached to a cylindrical golden bead with a stem and hemispherical element, from which it hangs. How it is suspended cannot be seen: possibly from a loop too, although there is not enough space for one in the gold “cup.”

Comments and Comparanda

On Punic glass pendants in general, see comments on cat. 544. This example belongs to a subgroup of Punic glass pendants representing male figures with hair or beard formed by coiling glass, dated between 350 and 200 BCE. If the hair of this example was not removed at a later period along with the suspension loop, then that is missing too, meaning the pendant does not correspond to any of the four published variants. If there was coiling hair, it would belong to the group (Seefried 1982, type C.III, pp. 8, 105–116, plate II) characterized by intense polychromy; these were occasionally made in a very large size, double that of 83.AM.1.1, which is an average-size example.

Provenance

By 1980, Private Collection; by 1982–1983, Robin Symes, Limited, founded 1977, dissolved 2005 (London, England), sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1983

Bibliography

Taimsalu 1980, p. 37, fig. 1a–b.

Mattusch 1994.

JPGM Acquisitions 1983, p. 255, no. 138.1.B, fig. 138b.

Exhibitions

None