Gold glass in late antiquity: the British Museum
collection
Project leader: Daniel T.
Howells
Department: Prehistory and Europe
Project start: October
2007
End date: 2010
Other British Museum
staff: Chris Entwistle
External
partners: Professor Liz James (University of
Sussex)
Project funded
by:
Arts and Humanities Research Council (Collaborative Doctoral
Award)
The British Museum
Description
The project focuses on the British Museum’s
collection of late antique (fourth century AD) gold glass, the
second largest collection of its kind in the world (after The
Vatican). Numbering almost sixty genuine pieces plus a small
number of eighteenth and nineteenth century fakes, forgeries and
experimental and marketed reproductions. The British Museum
collection includes examples of Christian, Jewish, pagan and
secular portrait medallions, vessel bases, plaques and diminutive
medallions/vessel studs, predominantly from the catacombs of Rome
and cemetery’s around Cologne.
Gold glass has never been fully examined or
analysed. This doctorial research project aims to address this.
Examination, including scientific analysis, of the material will
provide important insights into the late Roman glass industry in
the western empire, the development of early Christian iconography
in the minor arts, and on Italian collectors of the nineteenth
century and the collecting history of the British Museum. In the
general field of late antiquity, gold glass is discussed through
repetition of the same set of ideas in circulation since the early
twentieth century. This project will reconsider these traditional
but untested ideas both in the context of recent work on glass in
late antiquity and on recent developments in the field of late
antique art.
Objectives
The results of this project will be published
following the completion and final submission of the DPhil thesis.
Dissemination of information concerning individual gold glass
specimens will utilise the British Museum collection database,
which will be made available to the general public within the next
five years. Further direct dissemination will occur through a
number of other avenues including the British Museum Byzantine
Seminar series, which presents new research in an
objects-based programme, every year.
The central objectives of the project are:
- Produce a fully illustrated catalogue
including a discussion, chemical composition and illustration of
form for each specimen in the British Museum collection
- Examine in detail the various methods of gold
glass production
- Establish the iconography of the objects
- Establish the chronology of gold glass
regarding both iconography and technique
- Examine the spatial and contextual
distribution, nature, function and wider significance of gold glass
in late antique society
- Place the British Museum’s collection into
the broader perspective of holdings in other museums
Image:
- Fourth century AD gold glass vessel
base depicting Christ and selected Saints, 1863.7-27.9
Supported by
