page_title: Gold glass
section_title: Later uses and collections
hierarchical_section_title: Gold glass / Later uses and collections
caption_attribution_description: English: Gold-glass portrait of two young men (Bologna, Archaeological Museum)
context_page_description: 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.
  Various different techniques may sometimes also be described as "gold glass".
context_section_description: The technique continued to be used for mosaic tesserae, and at times for pieces that remained relatively large, for example in a small tile in New York with a pattern forming a cross, perhaps from a Syrian church of the 9th to 12th centuries.  A small group of Islamic vessels are decorated with mostly simplified vegetal motifs and probably date to the 10th century from Syria; the most complete ones are decorated over a large curved area and must have been made by using a "double vessel" method.  In both respects these are closer to the Hellenistic vessels than most Roman ones.
  From at least the 17th century the Roman glasses attracted antiquarian interest and they began to be removed from the catacombs, in a largely disorganized and unrecorded fashion; now only a "handful" remain in their original position in the catacomb walls.   The first significant publication on them was by Filippo Buonarroti in 1716, Osservazioni sopra alcuni frammenti di vasi antichi di vetro ornate di figure trovati nei cimiteri di Roma ("Observations on some fragments of antique glass vases decorated with figures, found in the cemeteries of Rome"), in which he made the extraordinary, almost proto-Romantic assertion that the aesthetic crudity of early Christian art, often remarked by connoisseurs of Roman arts, had served to intensify the piety of the worshipper, an early expression of feeling for primitive art.  After other studies, the Italian Jesuit Raffaele Garrucci published the first illustrated survey in 1858, with an expanded second edition in 1864.  In the 19th century a number of imitations, copies and downright forgeries of Roman pieces were made, mostly in Murano off Venice, by firms such as Salviati.  The first major public exhibition of these seems to have been at the Exposition Universelle of 1878 in Paris, by Italian firms.
  A number of museums around the world have examples of Roman vessel bottoms. The largest collection is in the Vatican Museums, with the 60 pieces of Late Antique glass in the British Museum the second largest.  A research project on their collection was due to finish in 2010 (see further reading below).  The Wilshere Collection in the Ashmolean is the third largest, with some 34 pieces.  The Corning Museum of Glass has 18 examples and the Metropolitan Museum in New York nearly as many.  The most recent of many catalogues since the 18th century are by C.R. Morey in 1959, with 460 Roman vessel bases, against 426 in S. Smith's thesis of 2000. The corpus continues to be expanded by occasional new finds.
caption: 4th-century portrait, now in Bologna
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