Gaulish red slip pottery bowl
Roman, AD 20-40
Made at La Graufesenque, near southern France
With relief decoration of tendrils and buds
This fine tableware bowl is covered with decoration. A band of
extended ovals rise from the base; a broad band of tendrils, buds
and flowers runs around the middle of the bowl, and multiple bands
of rouletting decorate the rim. The decoration was achieved through
impressing the designs onto the interior of a mould, and the vessel
was then thrown in the mould which was mounted on a potter's wheel.
This production technique allowed vessels to be produced uniformly
in large numbers, usually by workshops in which ten to fifteen
potters worked simultaneously. A stamp on the floor of the vessel
reads 'OFF(icina) BASSI (et) COELI' ('from the workshop of Bassus
and Coelus').
The vessel is part of the tradition of red slip ware or
terra sigillata ('stamped clay') pottery, a characteristic
feature of the Mediterranean in the Roman period. Terra
sigillata pottery production in Gaul began at Lyons early in
the first century AD, probably via Italian potters such as the Atei
and the Rasini from Pisa and Arezzo in Tuscany. Originally both the
craftsmen and the moulds seem to have been imported, but a decade
later large-scale production began further south at La
Graufesenque, using distinctive forms and decorative motifs.
This particular shape is known as a Dragendorff form 29, after
the German scholar who made the first systematic numbering of
Italian and Gaulish terra sigillata pottery in the
1890s.
H.B. Walters, Catalogue of the Roman pottery (London, 1908)
P. Roberts, 'Mass-production of Roman fine wares' in Pottery in the making: world-5 (London. The British Museum Press, 1997), pp. 188-93