A ROMAN CARNELIAN RING STONE PORTRAIT OF PITTAKOS CIRCA LATE 1ST CENTURY B.C.-EARLY 1ST CENTURY A.D.

拍品描述

A ROMAN RED JASPER RING STONE WITH A PORTRAIT OF PITTAKOS, CIRCA LATE 1ST CENTURY B.C.-EARLY 1ST CENTURY A.D. Of oval form with a flat, slightly bevelled face, the stone of deep red jasper carved in intaglio with the bearded head of a mature male in left profile. The features are sharply cut: a strong straight nose, prominent brow, and firmly set lips framed by a full beard rendered in short parallel striations. The hair is worked in a dense cap of small drilled curls that continues around the crown and behind the ear, terminating in a curling lock before the temple. The truncation at the base of the neck is squared. Natural fissures run across the field of the stone. The portrait belongs to a recognised iconographic type of Pittakos of Mytilene, the archaic Greek statesman and sage of Lesbos counted among the Seven Sages. The type descends from a lost Greek prototype and is identifiable by the combination of the compact curled hair, the closely cropped beard worked in schematic hatched locks, and the severe frontal set of the features seen in profile. Roman gem-cutters of the late Republican and early Augustan period drew extensively on such Greek philosopher and sage portraits, adapting them from statuary and coinage into the reduced field of the intaglio. Red jasper was among the harder and more prized materials in the Roman glyptic repertoire, favoured for portrait intaglios of philosophers, poets, and public men because its dense, opaque surface holds a crisp impression in wax and its saturated colour reads clearly against the gold of a ring bezel. Its use here, rather than a more common carnelian or nicolo, indicates a commission of some ambition. The wearing of a sage's portrait on a signet was a form of intellectual self-fashioning in Roman society of the late Republic and early Empire, aligning the owner with the moral authority and paideia of the Greek philosophical tradition, and functioning at the same time as a personal seal. This intaglio exemplifies the Augustan-period taste for Greek sage portraiture translated into the intimate scale of the engraved gem, where the physiognomic conventions of a canonical archaic statesman are compressed into a field of two centimetres without loss of specificity. Its survival, and the clarity with which the type remains legible, place it within the mainstream of Roman portrait glyptic of the transition between Republic and Principate. Dimensions: Length: 2cm

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