561. Bracelet

Condition

Intact. Iridescent weathering on some areas; many pinprick bubbles.

Description

The bracelet is made of an irregular, seamless ring of glass, D-shaped in cross section. There are no signs of painted or other decoration on any part of it.

Comments and Comparanda

Glass bracelets appear sporadically from the second half of the first millennium BCE (Spaer 1988, pp. 51–61). They are found in large numbers for the first time in the last centuries of the first millennium BCE in central Europe, in Celtic regions (Haevernick [1952] 1981, pp. 8–12). Seamless and decorated with tooling and applied colored glass, they become fashionable in the eastern Mediterranean region in the third century, and in the fourth century they spread to the entire Roman Empire. These are dark-colored, probably in imitation of corresponding products of jet, a particularly popular material during this period. Most of them are plain, continuous rings, although examples with impressed decoration, such as ribbing (like cat. 565), protuberances, and stamped symbolic motifs are known as well (Jovanović 1978, pp. 27–28; Marijanski-Manojlović 1987, p. 33;Riha 1990, pp. 64–66; Golofast 1996, pp. 183–185; Spaer 2001, pp. 193–205, nos. 437–66; Dautova-Ruševljan 2003, plate XXVIII G. 48/5; Radulović 2006, p. 367; Mandruzzato et al. 2008, pp. 54–58, nos. 40–66; Antonaras 2010a, p. 323; Cosyns 2011, pp. 147–155; Arveiller-Dulong and Nenna 2011, pp. 249–260, esp. pp. 249–250; Antonaras 2019, pp. 226–228, nos. 323–328).

Provenance

1979, Edwin A. Lipps, 1922–1988 (Pacific Palisades, California), donated to the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1979

Bibliography

Unpublished

Exhibitions

None