AN INSCRIBED BYZANTINE MOTHER OF PEARL AMULET DEPICITING A SAINT, CIRCA 7TH-9TH CENTURY A.D.

拍品描述

AN INSCRIBED BYZANTINE MOTHER-OF-PEARL AMULET DEPICTING A SAINT, CIRCA 7TH-9TH CENTURY A.D. Of circular form, the mother-of-pearl plaque incised with the bust of a haloed figure facing the viewer, the head slightly inclined and framed by a radiate nimbus rendered as a circle crossed by short hatched rays. The face is drawn in fine engraved line, with arched brows, almond eyes, a long straight nose and a small closed mouth. The hair falls in a thick plaited or veiled mass to the proper right shoulder, and the figure wears a tunic and mantle indicated by parallel diagonal striations across the chest. Flanking the head at shoulder level are the engraved letters N and Λ, set within the field of the nimbus. The plaque is mounted within a plain gold strip-bezel of irregular outline following the natural edge of the shell, surmounted by a ribbed cylindrical suspension loop for wear as a pendant. The identification of the figure is provided by the flanking letters, which follow the standard Byzantine convention of placing an abbreviated nominative beside a sacred portrait. The surviving N and Λ are consistent with the truncated form of a saint's name, though without further letters a secure reading cannot be advanced. The frontal bust within a halo, the veiled or plaited hair falling to one side, and the demure downcast expression conform to the established type for a female saint in middle Byzantine devotional imagery, and the piece would have functioned as a personal apotropaic and devotional object worn close to the body. Mother-of-pearl carried particular resonance in the eastern Mediterranean and Levantine workshops of the Byzantine world. Drawn from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, the material was associated with purity and with the holy sites of Palestine, where shell carving became a recognised pilgrimage industry in later centuries. Its luminous surface, catching and returning light, made it a fitting ground for sacred portraiture, where the substance itself echoed the radiance attributed to the saints. The gold mount, hammered into a simple bezel and finished with a ribbed loop, is characteristic of small-scale Byzantine personal jewellery, in which a sanctified or talismanic core was framed with the minimum of metalwork necessary to render it wearable. Engraved amulets of this kind belong to the wider tradition of Byzantine enkolpia, devotional pendants worn around the neck which combined the protective and the commemorative. Such objects bridged the public iconography of the church and the private piety of the household, carrying images familiar from icons and ivories into the sphere of intimate, daily devotion. The economy of line on the present plaque, drawn rather than modelled, places it within the engraver's tradition rather than the carver's, and relates closely to the linear style seen on contemporary lead and bronze pilgrim tokens. This amulet exemplifies the small devotional production of the early and middle Byzantine period, in which a precious natural material was transformed into a wearable image of a saint through the most economical of means. It stands as a survival of a class of object that, by virtue of its fragility and its personal use, is now considerably scarcer than the metal and stone equivalents from the same tradition. Height: 2.9cm

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