Field Notes
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Questioning the Portland Vase
Does a 2,000-Year-Old Roman Vase Really Date to the Renaissance?
The British Museum’s famous cobalt blue glass vessel known as the Portland Vase, now dated to the first century B.C., may in fact have been produced by a Renaissance cameo engraver, according to a prominent expert in ancient art.
Ever since the vase surfaced in the late 16th century, most scholars have interpreted its cameo figures as depicting mythological characters. New York antiquities dealer Jerome Eisenberg, however, suggests that there are stylistic inconsistencies in the rendering of the cameo figures. He believes the vessel’s creator was unfamiliar with the iconography of classical mythology, and based his work instead on scenes carved on a third-century A.D. marble sarcophagus now in Rome’s Villa Mattei.
Writing in the art and archaeology journal Minerva,a which he publishes, Eisenberg points to various incongruities indicating an “after the antique” pedigree:
The sea-monster depicted on the lap of the reclining female figure suggests that the woman is a sea goddess, though the tree behind her makes no sense in that context. Moreover, monsters of such diminutive size don’t appear until the late second century A.D.
The figure of a flying Eros is an anachronism; in no other ancient representation of the winged god of love does he fly or fail to carry arrows and a sheath.
The voluptuous torsos of the three female figures on the vase “reflect the feeling of the later Renaissance” and are almost Rubenesque. None of the three wears sandals, as would be typical of figures carved during the Roman period.
Unlike nearly all other columns that appear on first-century B.C. Roman reliefs and paintings, the vase’s solitary undecorated column is smaller than the human figures near it.
Officials at the British Museum stand by their first-century B.C. dating of the Portland Vase. Scientifically pinning down the vase’s age is impossible with current technology, since carbon dating—the usual method of dating ancient artifacts—requires that the material contain organic matter.
Eisenberg has now turned to comparisons with conclusively dated objects—both from the Renaissance and from the Roman period—to get a more accurate date for the Portland Vase. “One could theoretically use a computer to compare the proportions of the figures on the vase with other similar depictions,” he told Archaeology Odyssey.—N.B.L.
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Back On Board
Two years ago the scholar-diplomat Robert S. Merrillees stepped down from Archaeology Odyssey’s Editorial Advisory Board. As the director of the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI) in Nicosia, Cyprus, Merrillees felt compelled to resign upon learning that we intended to publish a report on Cypriot archaeology that included material researched in Northern Cyprus (Hershel Shanks, “Cypriot Land Mines: Military, Political and Archaeological,” November/December 2002). In July 2003, Merrillees retired as CAARI director, and he has decided to join our board once again. We gladly welcome him back, knowing that we will benefit greatly from his advice.
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OddiFacts
Pay Up!
Ancient Greeks were buried with a small silver coin, or obolus, in their mouths. The coin was payment for Charon, the mythological ferryman (shown in the third-century A.D. Roman relief carving, now on display in the Vatican Museum) who transported the dead across the river Styx to the underworld. Those who could not afford the passage were doomed to wander on the banks of the river for a century.
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Home Movies
Computers Generate 3-D Images of Ancient Roman Stages
Roman patricians eager to impress guests often decorated the walls of their villas with paintings of theater scenes, like the one shown, found in the first-century B.C. House of Cryptoporticus in Pompeii.
Ancient artists used tricks of perspective to fool the eye, creating three-dimensional effects on two-dimensional surfaces. This technique, called skegnographia, was first used in fifth-century B.C. Greece to embellish flat theater sets.
A recent project carried out by England’s University of Warwick has generated the first three-dimensional computer models of certain Pompeian wall paintings, recreating interior architecture and decorations likely viewed by Roman theatergoers. Researchers gleaned information about these stage sets from ancient frescoes and texts.
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www.archaeologyodyssey.org
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Questioning the Portland Vase
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Footnotes
See Zahi Hawass, “Mummies: Emissaries of the Golden Age,” AO 03:05.