The Portland Vase is a Roman cameo glass vase, which is dated to between AD 1 and AD 25, though low BC dates have some scholarly support. It is the best known piece of Roman cameo glass and has served as an inspiration to many glass and porcelain makers from about the beginning of the 18th century onwards. It is first recorded in Rome in 1600–1601, and since 1810 has been in the British Museum in London, although until 1945 it was on loan from the Dukes of Portland. It was bought by the museum in 1945 and is normally on display in Room 70.
Glassblowing is a glassforming technique that involves inflating molten glass into a bubble with the aid of a blowpipe. A person who blows glass is called a glassblower, glassmith, or gaffer. A lampworker manipulates glass with the use of a torch on a smaller scale, such as in producing precision laboratory glassware out of borosilicate glass.
A bowl is a typically round dish or container generally used for preparing, serving, storing, or consuming food. The interior of a bowl is characteristically shaped like a spherical cap, with the edges and the bottom forming a seamless curve. This makes bowls especially suited for holding liquids and loose food, as the contents of the bowl are naturally concentrated in its center by the force of gravity. The exterior of a bowl is most often round, but can be of any shape, including rectangular.
The Roman-Germanic Museum is an archaeological museum in Cologne, Germany. It has a large collection of Roman artifacts from the Roman settlement of Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium, on which modern Cologne is built. The museum protects the original site of a Roman town villa, from which a large Dionysus mosaic remains in its original place in the basement, and the related Roman Road just outside. In this respect the museum is an archaeological site.
A drinking horn is the horn of a bovid used as a drinking vessel. Drinking horns are known from Classical Antiquity, especially the Balkans, and remained in use for ceremonial purposes throughout the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period in some parts of Europe, notably in Germanic Europe, and in the Caucasus. Drinking horns remain an important accessory in the culture of ritual toasting in Georgia in particular, where they are known by the local name of kantsi.
A conchylia cup is a Roman cup type with a conical base and a slightly everted rim, made of transparent to slightly colored glass. Its distinguishing characteristics are stylized open mouthed fish with indented fins and curving tails, often made of translucent glass and applied wavy colored threads, and affixed to the outer surface of the cup to produce its three-dimensional aspect. The most common type appears to have stylized fish swimming to the left. These vases could be entirely free-blown or their cup shape mold-blown, and the fish, or other sea creatures, free-blown onto it.
The Lycurgus Cup is a Roman glass 4th-century cage cup made of a dichroic glass, which shows a different colour depending on whether or not light is passing through it: red when lit from behind and green when lit from in front. It is the only complete Roman glass object made from this type of glass, and the one exhibiting the most impressive change in colour; it has been described as "the most spectacular glass of the period, fittingly decorated, which we know to have existed".
Hohen-Sülzen is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Alzey-Worms district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.
Engraved glass is a type of decorated glass that involves shallowly engraving the surface of a glass object, either by holding it against a rotating wheel, or manipulating a "diamond point" in the style of an engraving burin. It is a subgroup of glass art, which refers to all artistic glass, much of it made by "hot" techniques such as moulding and blowing melting glass, and with other "cold" techniques such as glass etching which uses acidic, caustic, or abrasive substances to achieve artistic effects, and cut glass, which is cut with an abrasive wheel, but more deeply than in engraved glass, where the engraving normally only cuts deeply enough into the surface to leave a mark. Usually the engraved surface is left "frosted" so a difference is visible, while in cut glass the cut surface is polished to restore transparency. Some pieces may combine two or more techniques.
A rummer was a type of large drinking glass studded with prunts to ensure a safe grip, popular mainly in the Rhineland and the Netherlands from the 15th through the 17th century. Rummers lacked the flared bowl of the Berkemeyer and had much thinner walls. The hollow base was built up by coiling strands of molten glass around a conical core. Römers were quite distinct from the Berkemeyers, but both types evolved from the German "cabbage stalk" glasses which were cylindrical with prunts. Römers are usually green in colour and with Berkemeyers were sometimes engraved with images and inscriptions.
An Imperial Eagle beaker, or eagle glass, was a popular drinking vessel from the 16th until the late 18th century in the Holy Roman Empire. The enamelled glass was decorated with a double-headed eagle, usually in the shape of a Quaternion Eagle. The Reichsadler means "Imperial Eagle" or double-headed eagle which was the emblem of the empire, while "humpen" refers to a cylindrical drinking glass. These beakers became the essential medium to represent the most popular explanatory model for the emergence of the Empire: the quaternion theory as represented by Hans Burgkmair.
Pottery was produced in enormous quantities in ancient Rome, mostly for utilitarian purposes. It is found all over the former Roman Empire and beyond. Monte Testaccio is a huge waste mound in Rome made almost entirely of broken amphorae used for transporting and storing liquids and other products – in this case probably mostly Spanish olive oil, which was landed nearby, and was the main fuel for lighting, as well as its use in the kitchen and washing in the baths.
Cameo glass is a luxury form of glass art produced by cameo glass engraving or etching and carving through fused layers of differently colored glass to produce designs, usually with white opaque glass figures and motifs on a dark-colored background. The technique is first seen in ancient Roman art of about 30 BC, where it was an alternative to the more luxurious engraved gem vessels in cameo style that used naturally layered semi-precious gemstones such as onyx and agate. Glass allowed consistent and predictable colored layers, even for round objects.
Hedwig glasses or Hedwig beakers are a type of glass beaker originating in the Middle East or Norman Sicily and dating from the 10th-12th centuries AD. They are named after the Silesian princess Saint Hedwig (1174–1245), to whom three of them are traditionally said to have belonged. So far, a total of 14 complete glasses are known. The exact origin of the glasses is disputed, with Egypt, Iran and Syria all suggested as possible sources; if they are not of Islamic manufacture they are certainly influenced by Islamic glass. Probably made by Muslim craftsmen, some of the iconography is Christian, suggesting they may have been made for export or for Christian clients. The theory that they instead originate from Norman Sicily in the 11th century was first fully set out in a book in 2005 by Rosemarie Lierke, and has attracted some support from specialists.
Gold glass or gold sandwich glass is a luxury form of glass where a decorative design in gold leaf is fused between two layers of glass. First found in Hellenistic Greece, it is especially characteristic of the Roman glass of the Late Empire in the 3rd and 4th century AD, where the gold decorated roundels of cups and other vessels were often cut out of the piece they had originally decorated and cemented to the walls of the catacombs of Rome as grave markers for the small recesses where bodies were buried. About 500 pieces of gold glass used in this way have been recovered. Complete vessels are far rarer. Many show religious imagery from Christianity, traditional Greco-Roman religion and its various cultic developments, and in a few examples Judaism. Others show portraits of their owners, and the finest are "among the most vivid portraits to survive from Early Christian times. They stare out at us with an extraordinary stern and melancholy intensity". From the 1st century AD the technique was also used for the gold colour in mosaics.
A cup is an open-top container used to hold liquids for pouring or drinking. Although mainly used for drinking, it also can be used to store solids for pouring. Cups may be made of glass, metal, china, pottery, wood, stone, bone, polystyrene, plastic, aluminium or other materials, and are usually fixed with stem, handles, or other adornments, though a beaker has no handle or stem. Cups are used for quenching thirst across a wide range of cultures and social classes, and different styles of cups may be used for different liquids or in different situations. Cups of different styles may be used for different types of liquids or other foodstuffs, in different situations, or for decoration.
The Heritage Museum Pljevlja is a museum in Pljevlja, Montenegro. The museum collection begins with works of prehistoric art from the 1st–4th centuries BC. One of the largest museums in Montenegro, it was founded in 1952. Its holdings amount to over 5,000 items, of which only a small number are on permanent display, including the Pljevlja diatreta or cage cup.
Byzantine glass objects resembled their earlier Hellenistic counterparts, during the fourth and early fifth centuries CE in both form and function. Over the course of the fifth century CE, Byzantine glass blowers, based mostly in the area of Syria and Palestine, developed a distinct Byzantine style. While glass vessels continued to serve as the primary vehicles for pouring and drinking liquid, glassware for lighting, currency and commodity weights, window panes, and glass tesserae for mosaics and enamels also surged in popularity.
Enamelled glass or painted glass is glass which has been decorated with vitreous enamel and then fired to fuse the glasses. It can produce brilliant and long-lasting colours, and be translucent or opaque. Unlike most methods of decorating glass, it allows painting using several colours, and along with glass engraving, has historically been the main technique used to create the full range of image types on glass.
The Quaternion Eagle, also known as the Imperial Quaternion Eagle or simply Imperial Eagle, was an informal coat of arms of the Holy Roman Empire.
