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Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Jewellery & Gems / Three Byzantine Glass Ornaments - Bracelet & 2 Amulets
Eastern Mediterranean, Byzantine Empire. A trio of glass ornaments led by a deep blue-green bangle, drawn as a single continuous hoop of D-shaped section and decorated with painted motifs in white to pale silver, now softened by burial film. Accompanying it are two diminutive amulets: one a stamped boss whose surface has bloomed into rich silvery iridescence, the other an ovoid pellet whose swelling back and tapering underside faintly recall the scarab form long borrowed from Egypt by later Mediterranean workshops. Glass bangles of this type circulated widely across Byzantine and adjacent Islamic markets, worn stacked on the wrist as everyday adornment and, in the case of the small amulets, likely carried for protection. The scale of the two amulets is miniature; they are pieces meant for the palm, not the display shelf. Monochrome glass bangles were among the most abundant personal ornaments of the medieval eastern Mediterranean, produced in enormous quantity from the Levantine coast to Anatolia and the Balkans between roughly the sixth and thirteenth centuries. They were formed by winding hot glass around a mandrel or by opening a gathered ring, then finishing the join so cleanly that seamless examples are common. Painted and enamelled decoration, applied in white or opaque pale pigment over a dark translucent body, marks the more ambitious end of the range and is the same decorative logic that produced the celebrated enamelled and gilded glass vessels of the later Islamic workshops. The silvery sheen on the stamped amulet is not a manufacturing effect but weathering: alkali leaches from the surface during centuries of burial, leaving microscopically thin laminae that refract light into the iridescence collectors prize. Item # 204575
Estimate:£264.86
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorJewellery & Gems
Estimate:
£264.86
OCT 17 | 10:00 PM
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