Francesca Hickin
Head of Department
Lot 15*
A Roman blue-green glass lidded cinerary urn
6 July 2021, 15:00 BST
London, New Bond StreetSold for £15,250 inc. premium
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Anna Marston
Associate Specialist
A Roman blue-green glass lidded cinerary urn
Circa 1st-2nd Century A.D.
The collar rim folded outwards, with a pair of vertical 'M' shaped handles of thick trail rising from the shoulder with some encircling tooling mark bands, the piriform body tapering to the narrow splayed hollow foot, the disc-shaped lid with raised conical hollow stem surmounted by a knobbed finial, 37cm high incl. the lid, the urn 30.5cm high
Circa 1st-2nd Century A.D.
The collar rim folded outwards, with a pair of vertical 'M' shaped handles of thick trail rising from the shoulder with some encircling tooling mark bands, the piriform body tapering to the narrow splayed hollow foot, the disc-shaped lid with raised conical hollow stem surmounted by a knobbed finial, 37cm high incl. the lid, the urn 30.5cm high
Footnotes
Provenance:
Private collection USA, formed from the 1980s onwards.
In the early Roman Imperial Period cremation was the preferred method of burial in Italy and the Northwest Provinces where the use of cinerary urns for holding the ashes was common practice. Glass urns excavated from tombs in Italy, Gaul and Britain were sometimes found protected within stone or lead containers, which may explain why so many have survived intact.
Cinerary urns with double arched handles and conical lids, like the above lot, can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acc. no. 81.10.2a, b and 91.1.1297a, b. Interestingly, as with this lot, the lid of one of the Met examples 'does not fit the urn when placed upright' exactly, and it is suggested that 'it may, however, originally have been placed upside down like a funnel lid'. There are illustrations of urns being discovered with the lid pointing downwards. This is because they were often placed inside lead containers with flat covers, and the glass lid, if placed upright, would make the complete vessel too tall; see an illustration of an example from Carthage reproduced in F. Baratte, 'La verrerie dans l'afrique romaine: état des questions', Kölner Jahrbuch für vor-und Frühgeschichte, vol. 22, 1989, p. 147, fig. 7. Some urns with this shape of conical lid were pierced at the centre and could have been used as a funnel, so that libations could be neatly poured into the urn, again when the lid was inverted with the point facing downwards. For other similar forms of urn and lid in the Louvre cf. V. Arveiller-Dulong & M-D. Nenna, Les Verres Antiques du Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2005, p. 170, fig. 479, and for the lid p.176, fig. 505.