AN EXCEPTIONAL BYZANTINE GOLD GEM SET CROSS, CIRCA 7TH-9TH CENTURY A.D.

拍品描述

A BYZANTINE GOLD, EMERALD, SAPPHIRE, GARNET AND SEED-PEARL CROSS PENDANT, CIRCA 7TH-9TH CENTURY A.D. Of Latin cross form, constructed from sheet gold and rising from a stepped suspension loop of double-ribbed profile. The four arms are each formed as rectangular box-settings raised on a flat ground, joined at the crossing by a circular bezel. The upper, lateral and lower arms are each set with a cabochon or tablet-cut emerald of pale to deeper green tone, retained at the corners by small granules of gold over white beads. The central bezel holds an oval sapphire cabochon of strong blue, the stone showing natural inclusions and slight irregularity of surface. Below the crossing, a separately set pear-shaped garnet cabochon of deep red is mounted in a closed gold collet, forming a drop between the central sapphire and the lower emerald. Each of the four arms is bordered by a double row of natural seed pearls strung on fine gold wire and secured to the outer edge of the setting, the pearls retaining their original creamy lustre with some loss and irregularity consistent with age. The pendant follows the cruciform type that served as the central devotional ornament of Byzantine personal jewellery, worn at the throat or breast as both an article of faith and a marker of status. The hierarchy of stones is deliberate. The sapphire at the crossing, placed at the meeting of the arms, corresponds to the position traditionally associated with the head or heart of Christ in figural crosses, while the surrounding emeralds and the garnet drop articulate the arms and foot. The pearl borders enclose the whole as a luminous frame, an effect closely paralleled in surviving Byzantine cloisonné and gem-set crosses from the early medieval centuries. The choice of materials is itself a statement of rank and access. Sapphires of this quality reached the Byzantine world from Sri Lanka through long-established Indian Ocean trade, emeralds most probably from the mines of the Eastern Desert of Egypt that had supplied the late Roman and early Byzantine courts, and garnets from sources in India and Central Asia long exploited by Mediterranean and Frankish goldsmiths. Pearls, drawn from the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, carried particular Christological resonance in Byzantine theology, where the pearl was read as a figure of Christ himself, conceived without flaw and brought forth from the shell as from the womb. The combination of gold, sapphire, emerald, garnet and pearl was therefore not only sumptuary but exegetical, each material carrying a recognised place in the symbolic vocabulary of the Eastern Church. Construction by sheet-gold box-settings bordered with strung seed pearls is characteristic of Byzantine goldsmithing of the seventh to ninth centuries, a period during which the techniques developed in the late Roman workshops of Constantinople were sustained and refined despite the upheavals of the iconoclastic age. The relative simplicity of the bezels, the reliance on the inherent colour of the cabochons rather than on enamel or figural ornament, and the prominence given to the pearl border are all consistent with production in this broad horizon. This pendant exemplifies the Byzantine cross at its most characteristic: a devotional object in which the theology of light, the economics of long-distance trade in precious materials, and the goldsmith's discipline of restrained setting are held in a single, wearable form. Within the surviving corpus of early medieval Byzantine personal crosses, examples retaining their original gemstones and seed-pearl borders together are uncommon, and the piece stands as a coherent witness to the courtly and ecclesiastical taste of its period. Height: 7.5cm

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