A ROMAN RED JASPER RINGSTONE WITH A CHARIOT RACE CIRCA 1ST CENTURY A.D

拍品描述

A ROMAN RED JASPER INTAGLIO WITH A CHARIOT RACE, MOUNTED AS A PENDANT, CIRCA 1ST CENTURY A.D. Of oval form, the red jasper engraved in intaglio with a quadriga in full gallop moving to the left, the four horses arranged in overlapping registers with their heads and forelegs picked out in fine parallel cuts, manes rendered as short striations. The charioteer stands to the right within the car, leaning forward over the reins, his body in profile, wearing a short belted tunic and a crested helmet, the reins drawn taut from his outstretched hands to the bits of the team. The wheel of the chariot is visible at lower right, its spokes radiating from a central hub, while a ground line of short hatched strokes runs beneath the horses' hooves to suggest the track. The stone is set within a plain gold collet with a suspension loop above the bezel, adapted in a later period for wear as a pendant. Some surface abrasion and light scratching are visible across the field, with the polish otherwise preserved. The subject belongs to the repertoire of circus imagery that pervaded Roman visual culture from the late Republic onwards. Chariot racing in the Circus Maximus was the most widely attended public spectacle of the imperial capital, organised around the four factions, the Reds, Whites, Blues and Greens, and the successful charioteer, the auriga, was among the most celebrated figures of urban life. The four-horse team, or quadriga, was the prestige format, distinguished from the lighter biga, and the moment shown here, with the horses extended at the gallop and the driver braced against the reins, is the conventional engraver's image of the race at full pitch. Such intagli were worn as personal seals and could function equally as expressions of factional allegiance, as votive tokens commemorating a win, or simply as small celebrations of a popular subject. Red jasper was among the favoured materials of Roman gem engravers from the first century A.D. onwards, valued for the saturation of its colour, the fineness of its grain, which permitted detailed cutting at small scale, and its associations in ancient lapidary thought with vitality and the blood. It was a material suited to vigorous subjects, and the pairing of the stone with a racing scene is characteristic of the period. The mount, of plain sheet gold with a simple suspension loop, is a later adaptation that has preserved the gem intact while converting it from its original use as a finger ring or seal to a wearable pendant, a transformation undergone by many ancient intagli in the post-antique centuries. This intaglio exemplifies the compressed narrative economy of Roman gem engraving at its most accomplished, where a subject requiring breadth in painting or relief, four horses, a chariot, a driver, the ground, the motion itself, is fitted within an oval field of a few centimetres without loss of legibility or pace. It belongs to a class of circus gems that document the central place of the races in Roman urban experience, and survives in a form, set as a pendant, that records its continued appeal to later wearers. Length: 4.1cm

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