Two Roman Glass Unguentaria with Iridescent Surfaces

Roman, Imperial period, Judaea. Two free-blown glass unguentaria, each made from a bubble of greenish glass. Each has a round, bulbous body that rises into a long cylindrical neck, and each rim is folded inward and flared to make a sturdy lip for pouring. The taller flask has a slender neck with a hint of a waist at its base. The shorter one has a squatter, rounder outline. Centuries of burial have turned both surfaces into a shimmering skin of iridescence, with green, gold, and bronze tones glinting through patches of earthen encrustation. These little flasks held perfumed oils, cosmetics, and medicines in everyday Roman life. They were also often placed in tombs, perhaps carrying fragrant offerings for the dead. Each comes on a custom acrylic stand. Glassblowing appeared along the Syro-Palestinian coast around the middle of the 1st century BCE, and the Roman world quickly made it its own. Blowing was far faster than the earlier core-forming and casting methods, so glass changed from a luxury into an everyday material within a few generations. Unguentaria were among the first mass-produced blown forms. The workshops of the Levant, which had local sand and plant-ash fluxes on hand, turned them out in huge numbers. The rainbow sheen on ancient glass is not a decoration. It forms as the glass weathers in the ground: moisture slowly draws alkali out of the surface, leaving very thin layered films of silica that split light the same way a soap bubble does. Item # 205195

Estimate:$300

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