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.
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Status
- Currently Off View
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Department
- Arts of the Ancient Mediterranean and Byzantium
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Artist
- Ancient Roman
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Title
- Fragment of a Bowl
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Place
- Roman Empire (Object made in)
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Date
- 100 BCE–100 CE
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Medium
- Glass, mosaic glass technique
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Dimensions
- 3.8 × 2.9 × 0.3 cm (1 1/2 × 1 1/8 × 1/8 in.)
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Credit Line
- Gift of Theodore W. and Frances S. Robinson
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Reference Number
- 1949.1254
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IIIF Manifest
- https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/67680/manifest.json