A GREEK YELLOW GLASS CAMEO OF AN ATHLETE, CIRCA 2ND-1ST CENTURY B.C.

拍品描述

A GREEK YELLOW GLASS CAMEO OF AN ATHLETE, CIRCA 2ND-1ST CENTURY B.C. Of oval form, the translucent yellow glass worked in low relief with the bust of a youthful male figure in profile to the right, the head crowned with a thick laurel wreath whose overlapping leaves and binding ties are rendered with careful attention to volume. The hair falls in short curls behind the ear, the brow, nose and lips modelled in a smooth continuous line in the classicising manner. The truncation of the bust falls at the upper chest, terminating in a series of vertical folds suggesting drapery. The reverse is plain and slightly convex. The surface retains a faint iridescence and scattered inclusions within the glass, and the edge shows the softened contour characteristic of a mould-formed piece. The laurel crown is the defining attribute. In the Greek world it signalled victory, whether athletic (as awarded at the Pythian Games at Delphi), poetic, or, from the Hellenistic period, dynastic. The idealised features, short curling hair and youthful proportions align the figure with the type of the victorious athlete or heroised youth developed in later Classical and Hellenistic portraiture, and the same formula was readily adapted to ruler portraits in the courts of the Successors, where a laurelled profile could function as a claim to Apollonian favour and to divine or semi-divine standing. Whether this cameo depicts a specific victor, a generalised athlete type, or a young ruler assimilated to that type cannot be resolved from the image alone. Glass cameos of this kind belong to a technical tradition developed in the eastern Mediterranean in the later Hellenistic period, when glassworkers began to imitate in coloured glass the hardstone intaglios and cameos worked at courts from Alexandria to Pergamon. Yellow glass in particular was produced as a substitute for citrine, honey-coloured chalcedony, and, at the higher end, for gold itself, and pieces of this scale would have been mounted as ring bezels or as pendants. The production combined mould-pressing with hand-finishing of the relief, and the technique carried its own prestige: cameo glass was a luxury material associated with the sophisticated workshops of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid spheres, and its portraits circulated as private tokens of allegiance, commemoration, or personal identification. This cameo exemplifies the Hellenistic assimilation of athletic and dynastic portraiture within a portable luxury medium, where the laurelled youth serves as a compressed image of victory, virtue, and idealised selfhood. The confident modelling of the wreath and the classicising profile place it within the mature phase of Hellenistic glyptic production, when glass had established itself as a legitimate carrier of imagery previously reserved for hardstone. Dimensions: Height: 3.1cm

图片