A JEWISH BRONZE "MENORAH" AMULET, LATE ROMAN, CIRCA 3RD-4TH CENTURY A.D.

拍品描述

A JEWISH BRONZE "MENORAH" AMULET, LATE ROMAN, CIRCA 3RD-4TH CENTURY A.D. Of circular openwork form, cast in bronze and surmounted by an integral suspension loop, the disc pierced to reveal a seven-branched menorah rising from a central shaft. The branches curve outward in symmetrical pairs from the vertical stem, each terminating below the upper rim of the frame, with the outermost arms sweeping down and returning to meet the base. A short spreading foot is indicated at the bottom of the shaft, resting toward the lower edge of the disc. The surface retains a green and dark brown patina with areas of active malachite encrustation, particularly along the right side of the frame and around the suspension loop, and the metal shows the pitted, granular texture consistent with long burial. The central device is unmistakably the menorah of the Jerusalem Temple, the seven-branched lampstand described in Exodus as standing before the veil of the sanctuary. Following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D., the menorah became the pre-eminent visual sign of Jewish identity in the diaspora, displaced from its cultic function and taking on a commemorative and protective role. Its appearance on a portable amulet is consonant with this shift: the object is designed to be worn on the person, the sacred emblem carried close to the body as a marker of belonging and as a device believed to avert harm. The openwork treatment allows the silhouette of the menorah to read clearly from either side, and the integral loop confirms the piece was made for suspension from a cord or chain. Small cast-bronze pendants of this type belong to a wider corpus of Jewish personal ornaments produced across the Roman East in Late Antiquity, from Palestine and Syria to the diaspora communities of Asia Minor and the Mediterranean littoral. The medium is significant in its ordinariness. Where menorah imagery on synagogue mosaics, gold glasses, and marble reliefs speaks to communal and monumental display, bronze amulets of this scale belonged to individual devotion, affordable to a broad section of the community and produced in provincial workshops that also supplied comparable Roman apotropaic pendants. The choice of the openwork disc, common to Roman pendant forms of the third and fourth centuries, places the object squarely within the shared visual culture of the later empire while its subject anchors it to a specific confessional identity. This amulet exemplifies the domestic and personal register of Jewish material culture under Roman rule, in which the memory of the Temple was carried on the body rather than displayed in architecture. Surviving examples in bronze are considerably scarcer than menorah imagery preserved in stone or mosaic, and pieces retaining their original suspension loop intact are scarcer still. Dimensions: Height 4.2 cm

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