A BYZANTINE GOLD AND EMERALD CROSS PENDANT CIRCA 6TH CENTURY A.D.

拍品描述

A BYZANTINE GOLD AND EMERALD CROSS PENDANT, EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN, CIRCA 6TH CENTURY A.D. Of equal-armed Greek cross form, the four tapering tubular arms rising from a circular central boss and terminating in rounded, slightly bulbous tips, three of the four arms finished with a small applied granule at the point. The central boss is set with a collet-mounted emerald cabochon of oval form, retained within a plain raised bezel. The upper arm is surmounted by a separately attached suspension loop of flattened oval section, joined to the arm by a small spherical bead at the junction. The body of the cross is constructed from sheet gold worked over a core, the surfaces plain and unornamented, retaining a soft burnished lustre. The form belongs to the well-established repertoire of Early Byzantine personal cross pendants, in which the cross served as both a declaration of faith and an apotropaic ornament worn at the throat. The choice of an equal-armed Greek cross, rather than the Latin form, is characteristic of Eastern Mediterranean and particularly Constantinopolitan production of the fifth to seventh centuries, when this shape was understood as the cross of the Resurrection and of imperial Christianity following the conversion of Constantine and the consolidation of Christian devotional jewellery under Justinian and his successors. The use of high-carat gold in combination with a single cabochon emerald is significant. Emeralds reached the Mediterranean world from the mines of the Eastern Desert of Egypt, the so-called Mons Smaragdus, which were under imperial control and whose output supplied the courts of Rome and Byzantium. Their use in Christian jewellery carried both material value and symbolic weight, the green stone associated in patristic writing with renewal, paradise, and the living wood of the Cross. Worn against the body, such a pendant would have signalled the wearer's status as a member of the propertied Christian class of the early Byzantine empire, while the stone itself drew on a tradition older than Christianity in which green gems were credited with protective virtue. The construction, hollow tubular arms raised from sheet gold over a core, with applied granulation and a separately fabricated suspension loop, is typical of Byzantine goldsmithing of the period, in which weight was minimised and visual presence maximised through volumetric form rather than added ornament. The restraint of the design, depending entirely on the geometry of the cross and the single coloured accent at its centre, is itself a hallmark of the best work of the sixth century, in contrast to the more heavily filigreed and polychrome jewellery of the later seventh and eighth centuries. This pendant exemplifies the refined sobriety of sixth-century Byzantine devotional gold, in which doctrinal clarity and material luxury are reconciled in a single small object. The equal-armed form, the imperial emerald, and the plain burnished surfaces together identify it as a piece made for a Christian wearer of standing within the early Byzantine world, and as a characteristic survival of a tradition that would shape Christian personal ornament for the following millennium. Height: 6cm

图片