A BYZANTINE GOLD & GARNET CROSS, CIRCA 8TH CENTURY A.D.

拍品描述

A BYZANTINE GOLD AND GARNET CROSS PENDANT, CIRCA 8TH CENTURY A.D. Of equal-armed form, the four arms flaring outward from a central roundel and each set with a cabochon garnet cut to the trapezoidal shape of its cell. The stones are held within plain gold bezels of low profile, the metal drawn up around each garnet and burnished against its edge to retain the setting. At the crossing, a circular collet holds a further garnet cabochon, the cell framed by eight applied gold granules arranged in pairs at the cardinal points where the arms meet the centre. A ribbed suspension loop rises from the upper arm, supported by a small spherical granule at its base, allowing the pendant to be worn on a cord or chain. The cross is of the type known as a crux quadrata or Greek cross, the form most widely adopted in Byzantine personal devotion and worn as an apotropaic and confessional ornament. The deep red of the garnets, set against the warm yellow of the gold, produces the chromatic contrast prized in early medieval jewellery across the Mediterranean and the post-Roman successor kingdoms, where translucent red stones were understood to carry both protective and Christological associations, evoking the blood of Christ and martyrdom. The central roundel, larger and more prominent than the arms, marks the theological centre of the cross and would have rested at the heart of the wearer. Garnet, imported into the Byzantine world principally from India and Sri Lanka through long-established Indian Ocean trade routes, was the dominant red stone of late antique and early medieval gold-work, used in cloisonné and en cabochon settings from the Black Sea to Anglo-Saxon England. Its use here, combined with high-karat gold and granulation, places the pendant within the wider koine of post-Justinianic Mediterranean jewellery, in which Byzantine workshops in Constantinople and the eastern provinces produced personal ornaments for a clientele of officials, clergy, and wealthy laity. The granulation around the central collet, executed in small uniform spheres soldered without visible seam, follows a technique inherited from Hellenistic and Roman goldsmithing and continued without interruption in Byzantine practice. This pendant exemplifies the small-scale devotional gold-work of the middle Byzantine period, in which the cross was reduced to its essential geometry and elevated through the colour and translucency of its stones. The combination of plain bezel-set garnets, granulated centre, and ribbed loop is characteristic of personal crosses produced for daily wear rather than liturgical use, and represents the point at which Byzantine jewellery had distilled the inherited Roman vocabulary into a confessional ornament of restraint and chromatic concentration. Height: 5cm

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