A ROMAN HEMATITE MAGICAL GNOSTIC INTAGLIO, CIRCA 3RD-4TH CENTURY A.D.

拍品描述

A ROMAN HEMATITE MAGICAL GNOSTIC INTAGLIO, CIRCA 3RD-4TH CENTURY A.D. Of flattened ovoid form, the hematite gemstone carved in intaglio on one face with a striding figure shown in profile to the right. The figure wears a short tunic falling to mid-thigh and stands with legs apart, the feet indicated by short horizontal cuts. In the raised right hand the figure grasps a long staff or spear held diagonally across the field, while the left arm extends forward towards a stylised plant with pinnate leaves rising along the left border. A second, more schematic plant form appears at the right edge. The head is disproportionately large and turned in profile, surmounted by what appears to be a tall cap or crest. The surface preserves the characteristic dark steel-grey colour of hematite, with warm reddish-brown patches where the iron oxide has come through, and the ground bears the fine tool-marks of the intaglio cutter. The iconography of the striding figure among vegetation in a small, portable, engraved stone belongs to the wider corpus of Graeco-Roman magical gems of the Imperial period, a class of amuletic objects associated in modern scholarship with the loosely defined "Gnostic" milieu of Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor. Such gems combine Greek, Egyptian and Near Eastern elements into hybrid protective images. The figure here, striding with a spear or long staff and confronting or gathering a plant, recalls the type of the hunter, harvester, or reaper found on a number of magical intagli, sometimes identified with agricultural or apotropaic deities and sometimes read as personifications of specific medical or protective operations, the plant standing for the pharmakon whose virtue the gem was intended to convey to its wearer. Hematite was the preferred stone for magical intagli of this period, chosen not for ornament but for its perceived properties. The Greek name derives from its capacity to yield a blood-red streak when abraded, and ancient lapidary tradition, transmitted in texts such as the Cyranides and the lithica associated with the magical papyri, prescribed hematite specifically for gems intended to staunch haemorrhage, to protect the womb, to calm inflammations of the eyes and stomach, and more generally to bind and contain hostile forces. The dark, weighty, metallic quality of the material was understood as itself efficacious, and workshops in Alexandria and the eastern provinces produced hematite amulets in considerable numbers from the second through the fourth centuries. The style of cutting, with its heavy outlines, disproportionate head, and schematic rendering of drapery and vegetation, is characteristic of the later phase of magical gem production, when the refined Hellenistic glyptic tradition had given way to a more direct, sign-like idiom in which legibility of the protective image mattered more than naturalism. The engraver worked at speed and for talismanic function rather than for connoisseurial display. This intaglio exemplifies the workshop production of hematite magical amulets in the later Roman Empire, in which material, image and function were understood as a single operative whole. Its rough vigour of cutting and its combination of a striding figure with plant motifs place it within the broad class of agricultural or apotropaic magical gems whose specific ritual purpose remains to be recovered from comparanda in the surviving corpus. Dimensions: Length 2.7 cm

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