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Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Asian Art / Ancient Holy Land Roman Glass Drinking Cup, Iridescent
Eastern Mediterranean, Judaea, Roman period. A free-blown cup of translucent blue-green glass, its hemispherical body rising to a broad outsplayed rim folded outward and downward into a hollow tubular collar, the classic finishing gesture of Roman glassworkers who preferred a rolled edge to a cut one. The walls are thin and slightly asymmetrical, carrying the faint rotary traces of the blowpipe, and the natural iron tint of the sand has been left unpurified. Centuries of burial have laid down patches of silvery iridescence and earthen encrustation across the rim and upper body, the weathering that ancient glass earns rather than receives. Vessels of this shape served as ordinary drinking cups on Roman-period tables throughout the Levant, where blown glass rapidly displaced ceramic tablewares. Accompanied by a custom display stand. Glassblowing was invented in the Syro-Palestinian region around the middle of the 1st century BCE, and within two generations it had transformed the vessel economy of the entire Roman world. What had been a luxury material shaped laboriously by core-forming or casting became, with the blowpipe, fast and cheap enough for daily use. Judaea sat at the heart of this revolution: workshops in and around Jerusalem and along the coast produced plain blue-green tablewares by the thousand, and the recovery of glassblowing debris from the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem in deposits of the mid-1st century BCE remains among the earliest physical evidence for the technique anywhere. The blue-green cast is not a deliberate color but the residue of iron impurities in the sand, left uncorrected in utilitarian wares; decolorized or intentionally tinted glass commanded a premium. The silvery bloom is a weathering product, formed as alkalis leach from the surface during burial and leave behind microscopically thin lamellae that refract light. Item # 205130
Estimate:$400
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorAsian Art
Estimate:
$400
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