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BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Asian Art / Phoenician Hellenistic Gold Relief Inlay of Tyche
Near East, Levant, likely Phoenician, Hellenistic period. A miniature oval plaque of high-karat gold, its softly rippled surface worked in low relief with the bust of Tyche in profile to the right, veiled and crowned. The goddess of fortune and civic destiny wears the mural or radiate diadem that marked her as guardian of a city's luck, her veil falling behind the nape in shallow, fluid folds. The thin sheet is domed and slightly crumpled, consistent with a bezel detached from the hoop of a finger ring, where such repousse medallions replaced the engraved gemstone. Assayed at roughly 82 percent gold, the alloy sits comfortably within Hellenistic Levantine practice. Small enough to be lost in a palm, the piece is a personal talisman as much as an ornament, worn to keep Fortune close to the hand that made bargains. Tyche (Roman Fortuna) rose to extraordinary prominence after Alexander, when the newly founded and refounded cities of the eastern Mediterranean each claimed a personified Fortune of their own. The Tyche of Antioch, modeled by Eutychides around 300 BCE with her turreted crown and river god at her feet, became the template for civic imagery from Syria to Phoenicia, reproduced on coinage, gems, and jewelry across the Seleucid world. Phoenician workshops at Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos absorbed this Greek visual language while retaining an older Levantine appetite for thin gold sheet worked in repousse rather than solid cast forms, a technique that yields luminous, lightweight ornaments like this one. A veiled Tyche carried a second register of meaning: the veil signaled the bride, the matron, and the concealed workings of fate alike, an apt emblem for a signet worn against the skin. Item # 204543
Estimate:£263.88
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Estimate:
£263.88
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Est: £500
