A GREEK JASPER INTAGLIO DEPICTING TWO YOUTHS, HELLENISTIC PERIOD

拍品描述

A GREEK JASPER INTAGLIO DEPICTING TWO YOUTHS, HELLENISTIC PERIOD Of oval form, the honey-coloured jasper worked in intaglio with two youthful heads in profile to the right, closely superimposed so that the further head is seen just behind the nearer. Both figures are shown with full, curling locks bound by a wreath or fillet, the strands rendered in fine parallel incisions that spread across the upper field. The shoulders of the foremost youth are draped, the folds indicated by deeply cut linear striations gathering across the chest. A single fracture runs diagonally across the stone from the upper edge through the wreath and out at the lower right. The paired profiles, near-identical in features and treatment, belong to a familiar Hellenistic iconographic type in which two youthful male heads, often diademed or wreathed, are shown in tandem. Such doubled portraits were used for the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, the twin sons of Zeus and Leda whose cult was diffused across the Greek world and later adopted by Rome as protectors of travellers and cavalry. The pairing was also employed for dynastic images of co-ruling brothers or father and son, a formula that entered Hellenistic royal portraiture with the Ptolemies and Seleucids and was carried onto coins and sealstones alike. In the absence of specific attributes such as pilos caps or stars, the identification here rests on the doubled type itself, and the youths are most plausibly read as the Dioscuri. Jasper was among the harder chalcedonies favoured by Hellenistic and later engravers, its dense body taking a crisp line under the wheel and its warm, opaque tone contrasting effectively with the wax or clay impression a seal was intended to produce. The yellow-brown variety seen here was worked across the eastern Mediterranean workshops, and the intaglio format, oval, convex on the reverse, and sized for setting in a finger ring, was the standard vehicle for personal sealing in the Greek and subsequent Roman worlds. The seal was at once a mark of identity, a device of authentication, and a small-scale carrier of iconography drawn from the wider repertoire of coinage and sculpture. This intaglio exemplifies the compact figural economy of Hellenistic glyptic, in which the imagery of dynastic pairs and divine twins was condensed into a private, wearable format. The doubled profile carries into miniature a formula shared with contemporary coin dies, and its survival on jasper, despite the vertical fracture, preserves a clear witness to the type. Dimensions: Height: 3cm

图片