Italian Grand Tour Miniature Glass Cameo of Artemis with Crescent Moon

Southern Europe, Italy, Grand Tour period. A miniature disc of molded glass, deep translucent red where the light catches its edge and near-black in the mass, carrying in high relief the left-facing head of Artemis. The goddess wears her hair swept back in rippling waves and gathered into a chignon at the nape, a coiffure lifted directly from Hellenistic and Roman prototypes, while a slender crescent moon rises above her brow to identify her as the huntress and lunar deity the Romans called Diana. Cameos of this sort were pressed from intaglio molds and sold in quantity to travelers on the Grand Tour, souvenirs of an antiquity newly excavated at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Such plaques were mounted into jewelry, snuff boxes, and cabinet trays of impressions, likely intended here as a collector's specimen rather than a functional seal. Artemis, twin of Apollo and daughter of Leto, presided over the hunt, wild animals, and the moon; the crescent set above her forehead is her standard Roman-period attribute and the surest way to separate her from other idealized female profiles in the classical repertoire. The eighteenth and nineteenth-century vogue for glass paste gems descends from the workshops of James Tassie and Filippo Rega, and from the great impression cabinets assembled in Rome by Giovanni Pichler and the dealer Bartolomeo Paoletti, whose sets of sulphur and glass casts allowed the traveling connoisseur to carry home an entire gem collection in a fitted case. Red and amber-toned glass was favored because it mimicked carnelian and sard, the stones most commonly used for genuine ancient intaglios. Item # 204768

Estimate:$200

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