Description This bowl was cast using batches of different colored glass to create four roughly equal sections in translucent purple, yellow, blue, and colorless glass. On the interior is a lathe-cut groove just below the rim. The principal decoration comprises four hanging garlands of millefiori glass fused to the upper surface of each quadrant. Few vessels made of large sections or bands of differently colored glass are known from antiquity, and this example is the only one that combines the technique with fused-on decoration. The bowl thus represents a masterpiece of glassmaking from the period when cast glass was beginning to be supplanted by vessels made using the newly invented technique of glassblowing.
Selected Bibliography Eisen, G. A. 1927. Glass: Its Origin, History, Chronology, Technic and Classification to the Sixteenth Century. New York: W. E. Rudge, vol. 1, pl. 30, b.
Oliver, A. 1967. "Late Hellenistic Glass in the Metropolitan Museum." Journal of Glass Studies 9: 17, figs. 6, 7.
Stern, E. M., and B. Schlick-Nolte. 1994. Early Glass of the Ancient World, 1600 B.C. A.D. 50: Ernesto Wolf Collection. Ostfildern: G. Hatje, p. 268.
Arveiller-Dulong, V., and M.-D. Nenna. 2000. Les verres antiques. Vol. 1. Département des Antiquités Grecques, Étrusques, et Romains, Musée du Louvre. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, pp. 140, 141, n. 8.
Lightfoot, C. 2001. In "Ars Vitraria: Glass in The Metropolitan Museum of Art." MMA Bulletin, n.s., 59, no. 1: 21.
Picón, C. A., et al. 2007. Art of the Classical World in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 483, no. 390, ill. p. 336.
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