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Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Ethnographical / 109g Red Jasper – blood-red earth in wild mosaic – 5.0 x...
Before there was writing, before there was bronze or fired clay, humans already had a color: ochre — reddish, iron-rich clay that early humans began to prepare about a hundred thousand years ago in the Blombos Cave in South Africa for painting. In the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet, painted animals spread across walls thousands of years old, and in the graves of many early cultures around the world ochre was scattered over the dead — as the color of blood, of life that should go on, even if the body could no longer. Exactly this rich, earth-toned red lies over the face of this skull as if applied — calm, even, almost like a consciously drawn area. Yet toward the back of the head this calm breaks open: the image becomes mosaic-like, restless, almost stormy, as if the same red earth had broken into a thousand individual fragments there and reassembled anew. Mineralogically, red jasper owes its color precisely to hematite, which also colors the historical ochre pigment red. The mosaic-like zone at the back of the head results from brecciation: the original rock fractured into angular fragments, which were then re-cemented by a newly seeping silica-rich solution — two separate geological events, forever united in a single stone. Material: Red jasper (partly brecciated) Origin: India Dimensions: 5.0 x 3.8 x 3.3 cm Weight: 109 g Special features: Clear transition from uniformly clay-red facial area to mosaic-brecciated back of the head
Estimate:£2.54
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Estimate:
£2.54
OCT 17 | 10:00 PM
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