A BYZANTINE GOLD MEDALLION DEPICTING SAINT PANTELEIMON ON CLOISONNE ENAMEL, 12TH CENTURY

拍品描述

A BYZANTINE GOLD AND CLOISONNÉ ENAMEL MEDALLION OF SAINT PANTELEIMON, 12TH CENTURY Of circular form, the medallion worked in cloisonné enamel on a gold ground, the bust-length figure of the saint set against a translucent green field and shown frontally with a large nimbus enclosing the head. The face is rendered in soft pinks and purples, the features drawn in fine gold cloisons: arched brows, almond eyes with dark pupils, a long straight nose, and a small closed mouth. Dark hair falls in a rounded mass to either side of the face. The shoulders are draped in a crossed garment indicated by intersecting gold lines, and both hands are raised before the chest with palms outward, the fingers articulated by parallel cloisons. To either side of the nimbus, gold letters in two vertical registers spell out the abbreviated identifying inscription, with traces of Ο ΑΓΙΟC ΠΑΝΤΕΛΕΗΜΩΝ legible in the surviving cells. The enamel surface is uneven, with losses, crazing and corrosion products visible across the field, and the edge of the disc is irregular where the gold sheet has been trimmed or damaged. The figure is identifiable as Saint Panteleimon, the youthful physician-martyr of Nicomedia, by the beardless face framed by long dark hair and by the surviving letters of the standard Greek inscription. The raised, open hands are the conventional gesture of prayer and intercession used in Byzantine portraits of the holy physicians, marking the saint not in the act of healing but in the posture of mediator between the worshipper and Christ. Panteleimon was among the most widely venerated of the anargyroi, the "silverless" healing saints who accepted no payment, and his image carried specifically prophylactic and curative associations. Small enamelled portraits of this kind were often mounted on reliquaries, book covers, processional crosses, or worn as personal devotional pendants, where the saint's gaze and gesture were directed outward toward the viewer in a continuous act of blessing. Cloisonné enamel on gold was among the most prestigious of Middle Byzantine luxury techniques, practised in the imperial workshops of Constantinople and in centres associated with the court. The method, in which thin gold strips were soldered to a gold base to form cells subsequently filled with coloured vitreous pastes and fired, demanded both metallurgical precision and access to a controlled palette of glass colours, including the translucent emerald green and the manganese purples seen here. The medium was reserved almost exclusively for sacred and imperial commissions, sent as diplomatic gifts to foreign courts and incorporated into the most important liturgical furnishings of the Byzantine church. Its survival is rare, and individual roundels of this scale, detached from their original mounts, are typically the remnants of larger decorative programmes on reliquary caskets, icon revetments, or staurothekes. This medallion exemplifies the intimate scale and devotional intensity of Middle Byzantine cloisonné portraiture, where the iconography of a single intercessory saint is compressed into a roundel a few centimetres across without loss of hieratic presence. Its combination of the translucent green ground, the gold-drawn linear figure, and the abbreviated identifying inscription places it within the established Constantinopolitan tradition of enamelled saints' portraits produced for the adornment of sacred objects in the 12th century. Diameter: 2cm

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