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This blown glass bottle, found in a Han dynasty tomb, was made
on the Mediterranean coast in the first century. Its shape is
typical of Roman blown glass bottles of that time. The opening
of the Silk Road greatly facilitated commercial and cultural exchanges
between Rome and China and allowed for the transport of such fragile
luxury commodities over long distances.
A Closer Look
Glass was an extremely rare and valuable commodity in the ancient
world. The oldest glass made in China appears to have been beads
produced during the early half of the Western Zhou period (ca.
1046–771 B.C.). By the Han dynasty, Chinese artisans were
producing a wider range of items, including vessels, discs, and
sword fittings, most often made of light green opaque glass that
resembled highly prized jade. Chinese glassmakers used molds into
which they poured molten glass, adapting the well-established
technology for casting bronze and producing pottery figurines.
This dramatically colored vessel—made of green and transparent
glass decorated with white marbled lines and now covered with
a blackish patina gained from nearly 2,000 years of burial—was
blown. Because glass-blowing technology was not introduced into
China until about the fifth century A.D. and because the shape
and marbling of this flask was common in Roman
glass, it is thought that this bottle was made on the Mediterranean
coast and imported. During the Han dynasty direct contacts between
the world’s two largest empires, the Chinese and the Roman,
were established, as the provenance of this bottle demonstrates.
Notice
• The long thin neck and bulbous body of this
vessel
• The decorative quality of the white marble veins streaked
through the glass and how they emphasize the curvature of the
bottle
• The appearance of the patina
Consider
• The impact of the arrival of a dramatically
different material such as blown glass into China. Try to think
of other examples in contemporary society.
• The difficulty of transporting such a fragile material
as glass over long distances such as the Silk Route.
• What this glass bottle, which was originally transparent
green glass with white marbeling, looked like.
Visit the Met
• The Met’s Greek and Roman galleries
display a number of small,
multicolored glass containers with elongated shapes and
everted rims that were made in the Mediterranean region. Two
examples closely related to this bottle in the special exhibition
were made during the first century AD and are published in the
Met's exhibition catalogue The Year One: Art of the Ancient
World East and West (2001, p. 65, no. 52.
Did You Know?
Free-blowing glass is like blowing a bubble. This
bottle was made by heating the glass materials until they became
molten. The glassmaker then took a blowpipe (a long hollow tube)
and dipped one end into the molten glass, lifting out a hot
blob of glass, and blowing in short puffs through the pipe.
To keep the shape of the bottle symmetrical, the glassmaker
had to rotate it continuously while blowing. Once he formed
the initial bubble, he probably held the blowpipe vertically
to allow gravity to elongate the piece. This would have formed
the long neck. Then he heated the bottom so that when he blew
through the pipe, only the bottom part expanded, thus forming
the bottle’s bulbous body. Before the bottle was fully
blown, he added a streamer of white glass and swirled it into
the body of the bottle. The rim was formed after transferring
the bubble to a pontil (a solid rod) attached to the bottom
of the bottle. Molten white glass was added to the lip, which
was then shaped with a tool. While being buried underground
for many centuries, the moisture in the tomb dissolved certain
components in the glass, leaving silica-rich surface layers.
These layers refract the light, resulting in iridescence. Notice
that the white glass did not decay in the same way that the
green glass did.
(Correspondence with Lisa Pilosi,
Objects Conservation, MMA.)
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