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Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Jewelry & Gems / Roman Ring with Banded Glass Intaglio of a Centaur
Roman, Imperial period. A miniature gold hoop swells to a broad oval bezel holding a banded glass intaglio, its emerald field crossed by a single cobalt stripe that runs like a ribbon of lapis through malachite. Engraved into the glass is a rearing centaur facing left, forelegs lifted, raising a syrinx of panpipes to his lips; two scrolling lines trail behind his back, likely the flying pelt of an animal skin, and a small box or boot-shaped object rests below the hooves. The alloy tests at roughly 77 percent gold. Glass gems of this sort imitated banded agate and nicolo at a fraction of the cost, and such rings served as personal seals and signets as much as adornment, the device identifying its wearer in wax. The centaur occupies an unusually cheerful corner of Roman gem iconography. Where literature casts the race as drunken and violent, glyptic art prefers the musical centaur: a Chironic figure with lyre, syrinx, or thyrsos, drawn into the Dionysiac thiasos alongside satyrs and maenads. The panpipes and the streaming pelt here belong squarely to that Bacchic register, and the rearing pose with forelegs raised is a stock compositional formula on Imperial gems, where the diagonal of the body fills an oval field efficiently. The stone itself is a deliberate imitation. Roman gem cutters and glassworkers produced layered glass in bands of blue over green, blue over brown, and the famous nicolo pairing of pale blue over dark, in conscious emulation of banded agate and sardonyx. These were not frauds so much as an accepted second tier of the market, engraved with the same intaglio technique and set in the same gold bezels. Item # 205233
Estimate:$900
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorJewelry & Gems
Estimate:
$900
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ARMBAND, silver med genombruten blomsterdekor, Gustav Dahlgren & Co, Malmö.
09/30/2026
$34.85
Est: $40.15
