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Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Jewelry & Gems / Pair of Roman Glass Bangle Bracelets with Evil Eye Motif
Roman, Imperial period. A pair of slender glass bangles, each drawn and joined into a continuous circlet with a gently faceted outer face and a softly rounded interior. One retains a pale greenish body, the other a warmer olive-yellow tone, and both carry a shimmering iridescence raised by long burial, the surfaces flashing silver, rose, and pale blue as they turn. Around the exteriors runs a repeating band of small applied lenticular eyes, the apotropaic "evil eye" motif that circulated widely across the Roman Mediterranean and Levant. Worn as personal adornment, such bangles doubled as amulets, the eye set on the wrist to return a malevolent gaze to its sender. Their light weight and narrow aperture suggest they were made for a youth or a slender adult. The eye amulet is among the oldest and most durable protective devices in the ancient Mediterranean, attested from Mesopotamia and Egypt through Greek and Roman practice and surviving in the Levant and Turkey as the nazar to this day. Roman belief held that envy traveled through sight, the invidus injuring by looking, and the countermeasure was a reflecting image: an eye that stared back. Pliny the Elder reports whole peoples credited with the fascinatio, and amuletic responses ranged from phallic pendants to the glass eye beads and eye-decorated bangles produced in enormous quantity by Syro-Palestinian and Egyptian workshops. The iridescence prized by collectors is a burial effect rather than an original finish. Alkali leaching from the glass over centuries leaves behind microscopically thin laminar layers whose interference with light produces the shifting metallic sheen. Roman glassworkers made these bangles without a mold, winding a hot rod around a form and welding the ends, which is why the joint on such pieces is often nearly invisible. Item # 204988
Estimate:$400
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorJewelry & Gems
Estimate:
$400
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Medieval Emerald and Gold Ring (c. 1300-1400), gold finger-ring with
10/02/2025
$1,886.78
Est: $1,355.81
