Bring your auction to collectors worldwide!
Get listed nowBy subscribing, you are agreeing to the privacy policy. Unsubscribe anytime.
Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Glass / Roman Judaea Aubergine Glass Miniature Bottle, Zigzag Trail
Eastern Mediterranean, Roman Judaea, Imperial period. A diminutive free-blown bottle of translucent aubergine-hued glass, its squat globular body drawn up into a narrow cylindrical neck with a flaring, rounded rim. A single thread of the same dark metal was applied hot and tooled into a crisp zigzag band that circles the shoulder, the classic trailed ornament of Eastern Mediterranean glassworkers. Centuries of burial have veiled the surface in silvery iridescence and earthen encrustation, through which the deep purple body still reads against the light. Vessels of this miniature scale held perfumed oils, unguents, or cosmetic preparations, precious by the drop, and frequently accompanied the dead to the tomb. An included custom acrylic stand supports the piece for display. The invention of glassblowing in the Syro-Palestinian corridor during the mid-1st century BCE transformed glass from a luxury for the few into a commodity for the many, and Judaea sat at the center of that revolution. Workshops along the Levantine coast, drawing on the celebrated silica sands of the Belus River, supplied the Empire with vessels blown in minutes rather than ground from blanks over days. Trailed decoration of the kind seen here required a second gather of molten glass drawn into a thread and wound onto the still-hot body, then combed or pinched into waves with a pointed tool. The technique is deceptively simple and unforgiving: the thread must be applied at the moment both gathers share a temperature, or it shears away. Manganese and iron impurities in the batch account for the purple to amber cast of the metal, colors the glassmaker controlled only loosely. Item # 205127
Estimate:$250
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorGlass
Estimate:
$250
Bring your auction to collectors worldwide!
Get listed now
GÖRAN WÄRFF. GLASSKULPTUR, KOSTA BODA, SIGNERAD.
09/29/2026
$139.47
Est: $100.39
