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Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Jewelry & Gems / Byzantine Stone Cross + 2 Ringed-Dot Amulet Pendants
Eastern Mediterranean, Byzantine Empire. A trio of miniature carved-stone amulets, each small enough to vanish inside a closed hand. The largest is a Latin cross of pale cream stone, its arms swelling to squared terminals and its surfaces worn smooth by handling. Beside it sits a dark plaque, probably steatite, with an arched and stepped upper edge and six ringed-dot motifs incised across the face, a compass-drawn ornament repeated on the reverse. The third, in pale green-blue stone, is an openwork cross whose pierced quadrants and flaring arms are studded with the same concentric circles. The ringed dot recurs across Byzantine and neighboring workshops as a protective device, and objects of this scale were likely suspended at the throat as personal apotropaia rather than displayed. The ringed dot (a drilled center encircled by one or two compass-scribed rings) is among the most persistent ornaments in the eastern Mediterranean, appearing on bone, stone, and metal from antiquity through the medieval centuries. Its longevity owes something to technology, since a simple center-bit drill produces it quickly and evenly, and something to belief: the motif reads as an eye, and eyes deflect the evil eye. On a Christian amulet the device therefore doubles the protection, pairing the cross with an older prophylactic vocabulary that the Church absorbed rather than erased. Steatite was a favored medium for Byzantine personal devotional carving from roughly the eleventh century onward, soft enough to cut with a knife yet taking a fine dark polish, and surviving examples range from icons of saints to plain pectoral crosses like these. Item # 204843
Estimate:$350
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorJewelry & Gems
Estimate:
$350
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