A BYZANTINE GOLD & ENAMEL "FISH" RING, CIRCA 7TH-9TH CENTURY A.D.

拍品描述

A BYZANTINE GOLD AND ENAMEL "FISH" RING, CIRCA 7TH-9TH CENTURY A.D. The plain hoop of circular section expands at the shoulders into scrolled volutes, each terminating in a small applied bead, and rises to support a hexagonal bezel of stepped profile. The bezel is set with an inlaid ground of deep blue and speckled pink and white composition, framed by a plain gold border, at the centre of which is applied a small gold fish in low relief, rendered in profile with a rounded body, incised fins and tail, and a single beaded eye. The shoulders retain their looped mounts, and the surface of the gold preserves a warm, unpolished tone consistent with long burial. The fish, isolated against its blue field, would have carried immediate significance for a Christian wearer of the early Byzantine world. The image of the fish (ichthys) served as one of the earliest and most enduring signs of Christ, its Greek letters forming the acrostic Iesous Christos Theou Hyios Soter. By the middle Byzantine period, the motif retained its confessional and apotropaic force even as it became integrated into a wider vocabulary of personal ornament, appearing on rings, pectoral crosses, and pilgrim tokens. Set against a ground evoking water, the applied fish here reads as a compact devotional emblem carried on the hand of its wearer. The technique of setting a gold figural motif against an inlaid coloured ground belongs to a Byzantine tradition of polychrome finger rings in which enamel, glass paste, and crushed hardstone were used to imitate the effects of cloisonné and cellwork at small scale. The blue field recalls the prestige of lapis lazuli, a stone associated in the eastern Mediterranean with imperial and ecclesiastical luxury, while the surrounding pink and white speckled band suggests a second, contrasting composition packed into the outer register of the bezel. Gold in this period was the standard medium for jewellery of status, and the combination of a shaped bezel, scrolled shoulders and coloured inlay places the ring within a class of personal ornament produced for a devout owner of some means, whether in Constantinople itself or in one of the provincial workshops of Syria, Egypt, or the Aegean. The scrolled shoulders with applied beads and the stepped, faceted bezel are features that recur on Byzantine gold rings across the seventh to ninth centuries, when the transition from late antique to fully mediaeval forms produced a rich vocabulary of architectural bezels and symbolic devices. The reduction of the Christian message to a single applied figure, rather than a monogram or inscribed invocation, reflects a tendency in this period toward compact pictorial emblems that could be read at a glance. This ring exemplifies the small-scale devotional jewellery of the middle Byzantine world, in which a single Christian sign, set against a coloured mineral ground and framed in gold, was made to serve at once as ornament, confession of faith, and personal amulet. The survival of both the applied fish and the polychrome inlay intact makes it a coherent example of a class more often known through fragmentary finds. Dimensions: Length of face 1.7 cm; internal diameter 1.8 cm.

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