Bring your auction to collectors worldwide!
Get listed nowBy subscribing, you are agreeing to the privacy policy. Unsubscribe anytime.
Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Glass / 2 Holy Land Roman Glass Perfume Bottles, Piriform Unguentaria
Roman, Imperial period, Judea. A pair of free-blown glass unguentaria, slender tubular necks rising from softly swelling piriform bodies, the small vessels that carried perfumed oils, unguents, and scented resins through the Roman East. The larger retains a flaring folded rim above a body of translucent pale blue-green metal; the smaller, more petite bottle was blown in a green or yellow glass now darkened to opaque brown-aubergine, its disc-like mouth thickened at the lip. Centuries of burial have laid down a lustrous weathering crust across both, breaking into pearlescent silver, rose, and gold iridescence. Such flasks were made in enormous numbers after the invention of glassblowing in the mid-first century BCE, used at the dressing table and deposited with the dead. Both are presented on an included custom acrylic display stand. Glassblowing was invented in the Syro-Palestinian coastal workshops around 50 BCE, and within a generation it had transformed glass from a luxury for the few into an everyday commodity. The unguentarium is the clearest evidence of that revolution: a vessel so quick to blow that it could be produced by the thousand, cheap enough to be used once and buried. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE, credits the beaches near Sidon with the sand that made the industry possible. The iridescence that collectors prize is a product of decay rather than design. Moisture in the burial environment leaches alkali from the glass surface, leaving behind microscopically thin laminar layers of silica. Light refracting between these layers produces the shifting metallic spectrum, and where the weathering crust has flaked away it reveals the original translucent metal beneath. Item # 205116
Estimate:£150.79
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorGlass
Estimate:
£150.79
Bring your auction to collectors worldwide!
Get listed now
GÖRAN WÄRFF. GLASSKULPTUR, KOSTA BODA, SIGNERAD.
09/29/2026
£105.14
Est: £75.74
