Glass gold-band mosaic bottle

Unknown

1st half of 1st century CE · Glass · Greek and Roman Art

Translucent cobalt blue, translucent turquoise blue and opaque yellow partially mixed together to appear green, opaque white, and colorless encasing shattered gold leaf. Everted, horizontal rim with rounded outer lip; cylindrical neck; sloping shoulder; small carinated body, with straight side above and curving side below point of greatest diameter; flat bottom. Gold-band mosaic pattern formed from a single serpentine length of layered canes formed in the following order: blue outlined in white, blue, colorless with gold leaf, and green outlined in white and blue; the length is wound three times round body, being fused together across bottom. Intact; slight dulling and pitting, and faint iridescent weathering; encrustation on inside of neck. Rotary grinding marks on exterior. Gold-band cast glass was a particularly opulent type of early Roman glassware. It combines canes of brightly colored translucent and opaque glass with strips of gold leaf encased between layers of colorless glass. Only a limited number of vessel shapes were made in this way, and some of the most common are small globular or carinated bottles such as these. Similar shapes are also found amongst the earliest free-blown and mold-blown bottles that made glass cheap and accessible to most Romans. Gold-band glass, however, was undoubtedly a luxury product that only the very rich could afford.

Artist

Unknown

Date

1st half of 1st century CE

Medium

Glass

Culture

Roman

Department

Greek and Roman Art

Credit line

Rogers Fund, 1906