A BYZANTINE GOLD AND GARNET CROSS CIRCA 5TH-7TH CENTURY A.D.

拍品描述

A BYZANTINE GOLD AND GARNET CROSS PENDANT, EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN, CIRCA 5TH-7TH CENTURY A.D. Of Latin form, the cross constructed from four hollow gold tubes of circular section, the vertical shaft longer than the horizontal arms, the terminals of each arm left open. At the intersection, a circular collet set with a domed garnet cabochon is framed by a twisted gold wire bezel applied in the form of a rope-work wreath. Above the upper arm, a small spherical bead supports a plain wire suspension loop, drawn out and curved at the top to take a cord or chain. The gold retains a soft, slightly matte tone with traces of reddish earth deposit lodged along the seams. The cross is the central emblem of Christian devotion in the early Byzantine world, and pectoral crosses of this kind were worn as personal devotional objects, sometimes as amulets believed to confer protection upon the wearer. The garnet at the crossing draws the eye to the point of intersection, the symbolic centre of the cross, where later Byzantine and Coptic examples often place a depiction of Christ or the Lamb. Here the stone takes that role in abstract form, its deep red associated in patristic writing with the blood of the Passion. The encircling rope-work bezel, a motif inherited from Hellenistic and Roman jewellery, sets the gem apart as the focal point of the composition. Gold and garnet together carry a particular weight in the jewellery of late antiquity. Gold was the medium of imperial and ecclesiastical display across the Byzantine world, and its use for a personal devotional object signals a wearer of means. Garnet, imported in quantity from India and Sri Lanka through the Red Sea and Persian Gulf trade, was the prestige stone of the late Roman and early Byzantine east, used in cloisonné settings on Migration-period brooches and in cabochon form on Byzantine rings, earrings, and crosses alike. The combination of hollow tubular construction with applied filigree and a single cabochon is characteristic of eastern Mediterranean workshops in the centuries immediately following the Christianisation of the empire, when the cross emerged as the dominant ornament of personal piety. This pendant exemplifies the early Byzantine pectoral cross at its most economical and direct, where the religious symbol carries the design rather than figural ornament, and where the single garnet at the crossing condenses the theology of the object into one element. It belongs to the formative phase of Christian jewellery, before the more elaborate reliquary and enkolpion crosses of the middle Byzantine period. Height: 2.8cm

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