About this artwork
In ancient Rome, there was a high demand for colorful glass that could dazzle banquet guests alongside the expensive silver and gold serving wares meant to impress. Fragments like this one would have once been a part of larger mosaic dishes. The mosaic pattern was made by sagging molten glass into bowl-shaped molds, a technique used on many of these fragments is similar to millefiori, “thousand flowers” in Italian, a modern glass-making method in which tiny rods of colored glass are bundled together, wrapped in a sheet of glass, fused, and then thinly sliced to reveal swirls of a flower-like patterns. They were arranged side by side, sometimes together with bits of colored glass, and fused together with heat.
-
Status
- Currently Off View
-
Department
- Arts of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium
-
Artist
- Ancient Roman
-
Title
- Fragment of a Bowl
-
Place
- Roman Empire (Object made in)
-
Date
- 100 BCE–100 CE
-
Medium
- Glass, mosaic glass technique
-
Dimensions
- 31.4 × 41.3 × 5.5 (1.2 × 1.62 × .2)
-
Credit Line
- Gift of Theodore W. and Frances S. Robinson
-
Reference Number
- 1949.1216
-
IIIF Manifest
- https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/67591/manifest.json