A ROMAN GOLD "LOVERS" RING CIRCA 1ST CENTURY B.C.-1ST CENTURY A.D.

拍品描述

A ROMAN GOLD "MARRIAGE" RING, CIRCA 1ST CENTURY B.C.-1ST CENTURY A.D. Of substantial construction in high-karat gold, the ring formed as a broad oval bezel flanked by openwork shoulders worked into scrolling foliate and volute forms. The bezel is worked in low relief with two confronted busts, a male and a female, shown in three-quarter view and closely juxtaposed so that their shoulders overlap. The female bust, on the left, is rendered with softly modelled features, downcast eyes and long hair falling in heavy locks to the shoulders. The male bust, on the right, is bearded, the hair likewise long and falling in parallel strands, the features graver and more angular. The hoop tapers from the bezel through the pierced shoulders to a plain rounded band. The pairing of two facing or juxtaposed busts on the bezel of a Roman gold ring belongs to the iconography of the dextrarum iunctio and the marriage ring, a type given to a bride at betrothal or to mark the union itself. Where the fuller form shows the clasped right hands of husband and wife as a pledge of fides, the abbreviated form places the two portrait busts together on the bezel as a visual shorthand for the same bond. The busts here are not securely identifiable as named individuals, but the type is consistently read as the coniuges, the married pair, and the ring functioned both as an ornament and as a token of the contract of marriage. Gold in the late Republican and early Imperial Roman world was regulated in its use. The lex Oppia and later sumptuary provisions restricted the weight and public display of gold ornament, and gold finger rings were long the mark of senatorial and equestrian status before their use spread more broadly under the Principate. A ring of this weight and quality is therefore not a modest personal ornament but a considered commission, and the choice of a marriage subject on a gold hoop places the object within the domestic and legal sphere of the Roman elite, where the exchange of such rings carried both sentimental and juridical weight. The openwork shoulders, worked in a manner close to contemporary Hellenistic goldsmithing, reflect the eastern Mediterranean workshops from which much of the finest Roman jewellery of this period derives. This ring exemplifies the Roman marriage ring in its early Imperial form, where the confronted busts of the coniuges replace or accompany the clasped-hands motif as the emblem of the conjugal bond. Its weight, the assurance of the modelling on the bezel, and the surviving openwork shoulders together place it among the more ambitious surviving examples of the type, produced for a patron of standing at a moment when the iconography of marriage was becoming a fixed part of the Roman goldsmith's repertoire. Dimensions: Length of seal 1.8 cm; internal diameter 2.2 cm

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