The Fragility of Solace: Pothos and Memory in Late Roman Gold-Glass Portraiture

Abstract:

Using a rarely-explored format of Roman portraiture, the gold-glass medallion, I argue that the yearning desire for someone absent can illuminate the force of intimacy behind such small-scale private images. Known as pothos in ancient Greek, this longing both catalyzed portraiture’s invention anecdotally and grounded the artistic genre conceptually in a web of absence, memory, and surrogacy. Employing visual, literary, and epigraphic evidence alongside gold-glass medallions, I advance pothos as an interpretive tool to demonstrate the rich emotional tenderness afforded by some Roman portraits, expanding our notion of the genre beyond its more common political and honorific associations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

This paper stems from my doctoral research at Emory University. I have presented parts and versions of it at the College Art Association Annual Conference (2020), the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2021), and the Stanley J. Seeger ‘52 Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University (2022). I am grateful for the incisive comments and questions of Patrick R. Crowley and Michael Koortbojian, who served as respondents at CAA and Princeton, as well as audience questions and input at the Center from Kaira Cabañas and Jeffrey Moser. This research has benefitted from financial support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2017), the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (2019–22), the Pittsburgh Foundation (2019), the International Catacomb Society (2022–23), and the Seeger Center. I would like to thank the following colleagues who facilitated examination of gold-glass portraits and other objects in their collections from 2017 to 2023: Andrea Achi (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Simonetta Castronovo (Palazzo Madama—Museo Civico d’Arte Antica, Turin), Maria Gatto (Museo Archeologico Nazionale Gaio Cilnio Mecenate, Arezzo), Claudia Lega (Musei Vaticani, Vatican City), Laure Marest (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Alex Truscott (British Museum, London), and Florence Tyler (Victoria & Albert Museum, London). Margaret Kurkoski, Kimberly E. Schrimsher, and Jessica Williams Stark helped with image permissions, revisions, and citations, respectively, and I appreciate their kind assistance. Suggestions from Christy Anderson and two anonymous peer reviewers greatly strengthened this paper. Many individuals have read, discussed, or commented on various aspects of this research. I would especially like to thank Andrew Griebeler, Kenneth Lapatin, Christopher J. Nygren, and Eric R. Varner. Their various roles as mentors, editors, and interlocutors through multiple drafts were uniformly indispensable along the way, and I am extremely grateful to them for their unfailing generosity. Any errors that remain are, of course, my own. Unless otherwise indicated, translations of all inscriptions and of Latin literary texts are mine; translations of Greek literary texts are from the Loeb Classical Library series, Harvard University Press. Standard reference works follow American Journal of Archaeology abbreviations.

1 See Charles Rufus Morey, The gold-glass collection of the Vatican Library: With additional catalogues of other gold-glass collections (Vatican City: Biblioteca apostolica vaticana, 1959), 43, no. 238; Franca Zanchi Roppo, Vetri paleocristiani a figure d’oro conservati in Italia (Bologna: R. Pàtron, 1969), 210, no. 253; Silvana Pettenati, I vetri dorati graffiti e i vetri dipinti (Turin: Museo Civico di Torino, 1978), 3–4, pl. 1; Stephanie Leigh Smith, “Gold-glass Vessels of the Late Roman Empire: Production, Context, and Function” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2000), 42 n. 71.

2 Jane Fejfer, Roman Portraits in Context (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 157.

3 The corpus of third-century ce gold-glass portraiture: Museo Archeologico Nazionale “Gaio Cilnio Mecenate” 14973 (Arezzo, Italy); Museo Civico Archeologico di Bologna PCR 1 (Bologna, Italy); Museo Civico Archeologico di Bologna PCR 2 (Bologna, Italy); Museo Civico Archeologico di Bologna PCR 3 (Bologna, Italy); Museo di Santa Giulia, example mounted on the Cross of Desiderius (Brescia, Italy); Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire I.A. 3700, formerly 11166, (Brussels, Belgium); Corning Museum of Glass 90.1.3 (Corning, New York, USA); British Museum 1890,0901.1 (London, UK); Victoria & Albert Museum 1052-1868 (London, UK); Metropolitan Museum of Art 17.190.109a (New York, New York, USA); Metropolitan Museum of Art 26.258 (New York, New York, USA); Portrait of a Man in Tunic and Chlamys in situ in Catacomb of Panfilo (Rome, Italy); Palazzo Madama-Museo Civico d’Arte Antica 0094/ VD (Turin, Italy); Biblioteca Apostilica Vaticana, Museo Sacro 60639 (Vatican City); Biblioteca Apostilica Vaticana, Museo Sacro 60699 (Vatican City); Biblioteca Apostilica Vaticana, Museo Sacro 60700 (Vatican City); Biblioteca Apostilica Vaticana, Museo Sacro 60701 (Vatican City); Biblioteca Apostilica Vaticana, Museo Sacro 60743 (Vatican City).

4 As such, I offer this investigation as a case study contributing to the much larger discussion of what a Roman portrait was in an absolute sense and the portrait’s place in Roman society. On that discussion, see, for instance, Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Peter Stewart, Statues in Roman Society: Representation and Response (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Fejfer, Roman Portraits.

5 A key exception is Ivan Drpić, Epigram, Art, and Devotion in Later Byzantium (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), especially at 332–395. I have been grateful for Ivan Drpić’s generous readiness to discuss pothos with me on several occasions.

6 Maurizio Bettini’s The Portrait of the Lover (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) represents a significant foundation on which my investigation builds by a adding materiality-based angle to his largely literary study.

7 Daniel T. Howells, A Catalogue of the Late Antique Gold Glass in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 2015), 41.

8 Principle texts include Eraclius’s De Coloribus et Artibus Romanorum (tenth century), Theophilus’s De diversibus artibus (twelfth century), and Cennino Cennini’s Il libro dell’arte o trattato della pittura (fourteenth century). For accounts of attempts at recreating gold sandwich glass, see: Pettenati, I vetri dorati, xv–xviii; Renate Pillinger, Studien zu römischen Zwischengoldgläsern (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1984), 50–80; Howells, Catalogue, 41–45.

9 See Raffaele Garrucci, Vetri ornati di figure in oro trovati nei cimiteri dei cristiani primitivi di Roma (Rome: Tipografia Salviucci, 1858,) 37, pl. 16, no. 1; Hermann Vopel, Die altchristlicehn Goldgläser: Ein Beitrag zur altchristlichen Kumst- und Kulturgeschichte (Freiburg: J. C. B. Mohr, 1899), 9, 12, 19, 30, 54, no. 435; C. Louise Avery, “Early Christian Gold Glass,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 16, no. 8 (1921): 175.

10 For example, Fernand de Mély, “Le médaillon de la croix du musée chrétien de Brescia,” Aréthuse 10 (1926): 4–5; Hayford Peirce, “Le Verre Peint de Brescia,” Aréthuse 14 (1927): 1–3; Kurt Weitzmann, ed., Age of Spiritualty: Late Antique and Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Century; Catalogue of the Exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, November 19, 1977 through Februry 12, 1978 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1979), 288; Axel von Saldern, Antike Glas (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2004), 466; Howells, Catalogue, 59.

11 Antonio Bosio, Roma sotteranea (Rome: G. Facciotti, 1632–1634).

12 Landmark texts include Filippo Buonarruoti’s 1716 monograph, the first on gold sandwich glass, Raffaele Garrucci’s 1858 monograph, the earliest systematic attempt to treat gold-glass categorically, which included 340 examples in line drawings, and Charles Rufus Morey’s posthumous catalog of the gold-glass collection in the Vatican Museums, alongside other collections. To this day, the latter remains the most comprehensive catalog of gold sandwich glass, with 470 examples. See Filippo Buonarruoti, Osservazioni sopra alcuni frammenti di vasi antichi di vetro ornati di figure trovati nei cimiteri di Roma (Florence: J. Guiducci, 1716); Garrucci, Vetri ornati; Morey, Gold-glass collection.

13 See Weitzmann, Age of Spirituality, 287–88; Donald B. Harden, ed., Glass of the Caesars (Milan; Olivetti, 1987), 276–77; Jaś Elsner, Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 17–18; Kenneth Lapatin, Luxus: The Sumptuous Arts of Greece and Rome (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2015), 236–37; Lapatin, “Luxury Arts,” in A Companion to Roman Art, ed. Barbara E. Borg (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2015), 338–39; Susan Walker, “Gold-Glass in Late Antiquity,” in The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Art, ed. Robin M. Jensen and Mark D. Ellison (London: Routledge, 2018), 124–40. Indeed, the gold-glass portrait in Brescia features in Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity. AD 150-750 and Stokstad’s introductory art history textbook. See Brown, The World of Late Antiquity. AD 150-750 (New York: Norton, 1971), frontispiece; M. Stokstad, Art History, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Harlow, NJ: Pearson/ Prentice Hall, 2005), 237.

14 An exception is Hallie Meredith, “Engaging Mourners and Maintaining Unity: Third and Fourth Century Gold-Glass Roundels from Roman Catacombs,” Religion in the Roman Empire 1, no. 2 (2015): 219–41. The studies by Manuela Laubenberger and Giulia Croci differ from this study in scope, as they consider dozens of gold-glass objects excluded here on the basis of date and style. See Manuela Laubenberger, “Porträts auf römischen Zwischengoldgläsern,” Mitteilungen zur christlichen Archäologie 1 (1995): 51–58; Giulia Croci, “Portraiture on Early Christian Gold-Glass: Some Observations,” in The Face of the Dead and the Early Christian World, ed. Ivan Foletti (Rome: Viella, 2013), 43–60.

15 First attested in Santa Maria in Solario, Brescia, in the 1657 writings of Abbess Angela Baitelli. “La Croce di Desiderio,” Fondazione Brescia Musei, accessed March 20, 2019, https://www.bresciamusei.com/nsantagiulia.asp?nm=14&t=I+capolavori%2E+La+Croce+di+Desiderio.

16 A comparable cross encrusted with spoliated ancient gems is the Lothar Cross in Aachen. See Dale Kinney, “The Concept of Spolia,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, 2nd ed., ed. Conrad Rudolph (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2019), 331–56, fig. 14-1.

17 The main exceptions are Aus’m Weerth and Haevernick, who revives the former’s hypothesis that all gold sandwich glass was made for the insertion into catacomb walls and did not originally take the form of vessels. See Ernst Aus’m Weerth, “Römische Gläser,” Jahrbücher des Vereins von Alterthumsfreunden in Rheinlands 63 (1878): 99–114; Thea Elisabeth Haevernick “Zu den Goldgläsern (Fondi d’oro),” Jahrbuch des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz 9 (1962): 58–59; Howells, Catalogue, 6–8.

18 On original vessel profiles, see Smith, “Gold-glass Vessels,” e.g., pls. 3, 4, 7, 8. On iconography, see Josef Engemann, “Bemerkungen zu spätrömischen gläsern mit goldfoliendekor,”

Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 11–12 (1968–69): 7–25. On the non-funerary nature of inscriptions, see Howells, Catalogue, 62.

19 The literature on these hypotheses is deep. On the possibility of domestic usage, see Smith, “Gold-glass Vessels,” ii, 179–95; Susan Walker, Saints and Salvation: The Wilshere Collection of Gold-glass, Sarcophagi, and Inscriptions from Rome and Southern Italy (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2017), 75–76. On banqueting, see Umberto Utro, “Le immagini e il culto dei santi sui vetri dorati romani durante il pontificato di Damaso e Siricio (366-399),” in 387 d.C. Ambrogio e Agostino. Le sorgenti dell’Europa, ed. Paolo Pasini (Milan: Olivares, 2003), 141. On refrigeria (commemorative meals for the dead), see Walker, Saints and Salvation, 76. On saints’ feast days and banqueting, see see Lucy Grig, “Portraits, Pontiffs and the Christianization of Fourth-Century Rome,” Papers of the British School at Rome 72 (2004): 216; Howells, Catalogue, 61. On festive gift-giving, see O. M. Dalton, “The gilded glasses of the catacombs,” Archaeological Journal 58 (1901): 241; Lucia Faedo, “Per una classificazione preliminare dei vetri dorati tardoromani,” Annali della Scuola Normale superior de Pisa Classe di Lettere e Fiolosofia 8, no. 3 (1978), 1025–26; Smith, Gold-glass Vessels, 130; Howells, Catalogue, 62.

20 This interpretation has been proposed for more than a century, suggested by scholars ranging from O. M. Dalton in 1901 to Hallie Meredith in 2015. Meredith specifically refers to the gold-glass portraits as pendants. See Dalton, “Gilded glasses,” 227; Meredith, “Engaging Mourners,” 224, 236.

21 For this observation on the circumscribing golden line, I am indebted to Tristan Weddigen.

22 Barbara E. Borg, Crisis and Ambition: Tombs and Burial Customs in Third-Century Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 97–98.

23 Fabrizio Bisconti, “The Decoration of Roman Catacombs,” in The Christian Catacombs of Rome, ed. Fabrizio Bisconti (Regesnburg: Schnell u. Steiner, 1999), 7, 72, 75, 80.

24 Apuleius, Metamorphoses 11.3.

25 See Wladimir de Grüneisen, “Il ritratto su vetro del Museo di Arezzo,” Rivista d’arte 1–2 (1917–18): 97–106; Morey, Gold-glass collection, 41, no. 234; Pillinger, Studien, 35, no. 75; Laubenberger, “Porträts,” 54, fig. 1; Smith, “Gold-glass Vessels,” 42 n. 71; Lapatin, Luxus, 237, pl. 59.

26 Metropolitan Museum of Art 26.258 is presented in three-quarters view. This figure is anomalous in other regards; for instance, he is almost entirely nude, a classicizing gesture to heroism and athleticism.

27 On the toga contabulata, see Shelley Stone, “The Toga: From National to Ceremonial Costume,” in The World of Roman Costume, ed. Judith Lynn Sebesta and Larissa Bonfante (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), especially 24–25.

28 On which see, for instance, Susan Wood, Roman Portrait Sculpture 217-260 A.D. The Transformation of an Artistic Tradition (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986).

29 See Vopel, Die altchristlicehn Goldgläser, 41, no. 76; Carlo Albizzati, “Vetri dorati nel terzo secolo d. Cr.,” Bulletino dell’imperiale istituto archeologico germanico, sezione romana 29 (1914): 242–47; Morey, Gold-glass collection, 3, no. 3; Zanchi Roppo, Vetri paleocristiani, 78–80, no. 84, fig. 26; Faedo, “Per una classificazione,” 1027; Pillinger, Studien, 35, 85, fig. 76; Smith, “Gold-glass Vessels,” 41; Lapatin, Luxus, 236, pl. 57.

30 Moreover, this reading is consistent with the practice in Late Antiquity of using detached signa, or nicknames, to address cultivated Roman elites, reinforcing the status of the gold-glass portraits as prestigious objects in light of past scholarly debate questioning the luxury status of gold sandwich glass. On detached signa see Iiro Kajanto, Onomastic Studies in the Early Christian Inscriptions of Rome and Carthage (Helsinki: Helsingfors, 1963) and Kajanto, Supernomina: A Study in Latin Epigraphy (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1966). On debating the luxury status of gold-glass, see, for example, Alan Cameron “Orfitus and Constantius: A Note on Roman Gold-Glasses,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 9 (1996): 299–300.

31 On the chlamys, see L. Cleland, G. Davies, and L. Llewellyn-Jones, Greek and Roman Dress from A to Z (London: Routledge, 2007), 34. On the possible identification of Eusebius as a member of the military, see Albizzati, “Vetri dorati,” 244.

32 On the V&A portrait, see Vopel, Die altchristlicehn Goldgläser, no. 523; Morey, Gold-glass collection, 59, no. 353; Pillinger, Studien, 35, fig. 77; Laubenberger, “Porträts,” 55, fig. 2; Smith, “Gold-glass Vessels,” 42 n. 71, 44; Howells, Catalogue, 14, 55, pl. 4. On the British Museum portrait, see Howells, Catalogue, 11–13, 16, 31, 34, 36, 51, 59, 62, 68–69, 114–15, 154, 166, no. 3; C. Fontaine-Hodiamont and P. Fontaine, “Le Médaillon en verre doré au portrait d’ Aristion, deuxième moitié du III e siècle apr. J.-C.,” Journal of Glass Studies 59 (2017): 98, fig. 14.

33 See Cristóbal Veny, “El estandarte romano de Pollentia testimonio de la existencia de un collegium iuvenum,” Mayurqa 29 (2003): 51–70 on a bronze standard from the collegium iuvenum of Pollentia dating from the second to third centuries ce; note the double-hooped form and intricate opus interrasile. See a standard from Flobecq, Belgium (Brussels, Musée Cinquantenaire, inv. no. B5569 first or second century ce) for example adorned with rampant lions on upper portion of frame. See also a standard from Athens, now in the Musée de l’Armée, Paris, for another lion-topped example.

34 See Vopel, Die altchristlicehn Goldgläser, no. 507; Albizzati, “Vetri dorati,” 247ff.; de Mély, “Le médaillon,” 1–10; Joseph Breck, “The Ficoroni Medallion and Some Other Gilded Glasses in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Art Bulletin 9, no. 4 (1927): 353–56; Peirce, “Le Verre Peint,” 1–3; Morey, Gold-glass collection, 42, no. 237; Zanchi Roppo, Vetri paleocristiani, 22–25, no. 12; Faedo, “Per una classificazione,” 1027 n. 6; Pillinger, Studien, 31–36, fig. 68; Laubenberger, “Porträts,” 53; Smith, “Gold-glass Vessels,” 41, 43, 44; Howells, Catalogue, 7–9, 9 n. 34, 10 n. 64, 62, 115–16, 119; Lapatin, Luxus, 236–37, pl. 58.

35 Zanchi Roppo, Vetri paleocristiani, 22–25. I believe that a signature is implausible, given that no signatures are attested in the entire corpus of gold sandwich glass and that the names are likely addressed to the subjects given that they are in the vocative (“Bounnerios! Keramios!”). These are uncommon but not implausible Late Antique names that reflect the popularity of new coinages in -ius/ -ios during this period. On nicknames in Late Antiquity ending in -ius, see Kajanto, Supernomina, 62. I thank Heikki Solin for discussing aspects of this inscription with me in 2021.

36 Charles Rufus Morey interpreted the central figure as the eldest. See Morey, Gold-glass collection, 42.

37 Found attached to a tile in the Catacomb of Panfilo, Rome. See Morey, Gold-glass collection, 3, no. 1; Zanchi Roppo, Vetri paleocristiani, 80–82, no. 86, fig. 27; Faedo, “Per una classificazione,” 1027, no. 6; Pillinger, Studien, 33, 78, 89, figs. 20, 236; Manuela Laubenberger, “Porträts auf römischen Zwischengoldgläsern mit zweifelhafter Authentizität” (PhD diss., Universität Wien, 1994), 58.

38 As seen, for instance, in a marble bust of a man in the Musei Capitolini dating to around 240 to 250 ce (Musei Capitolini Salle delle Colombe MC 309). See Klaus Fittschen and Paul Zanker, Katalog der römischen Porträts in den Capitolinischen Museen und den anderen kommunalen Sammlungen der Stadt Rom 2. Die männlichen Privatporträts (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 171–72, pls. 211–12. See also the marble bust of a woman in the Metropolitan Museum of Art dating to around 250 ce (Metropolitan Museum of Art 18.145.39). See Paul Zanker, Roman Portraits: Sculptures in Stone and Bronze in the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016), 192, 227–29, no. 87.

39 Museo Civico Archeologico di Bologna PCR 3 is the other example with a drinking toast. It is written in Greek transliterated into the Latin alphabet: PIE ZESES (“Drink, that you may live!”).

40 See Hallie Meredith, Word Becomes Image: Openwork vessels as a reflection of Late Antique Transformation (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2015), 180–81 with earlier literature.

41 Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, eds. A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940) s.v. “πόθος.”

42 Plato, Cratylus 419e–420a.

43 Se also numerous archaic poets: Claude Calame, The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 46–47 and especially 47 n. 35.

44 Roman authors struggled to translate pothos into Latin with a one-to-one substitution, e.g., Curtius, Histories of Alexander the Great 4.7.8 uses ingens cupido rather than simply cupido.

45 Of the ten portrait roundels with inscriptions, four are in Greek. On the uses of Greek and its status within the Empire, see Jorma Kaimio, The Romans and the Greek Language (Helsinki: Societas scientiarum Fennica, 1979).

46 Cyril Mango, Byzantium: The New Empire of Rome (New York: Scribner, 1980), 185.

47 The literature on the Second Sophistic is vast. See Graham Anderson, The Second Sophistic: A Cultural Phenomenon in the Roman Empire (London: Routledge, 1993); Daniel S. Richter and William A. Johnson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Tim Whitmarsh, The Second Sophistic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

48 On Achilles’s pothos, see Emily P. Austin, Grief and the Hero: The Futility of Longing in the Iliad (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021). The Odyssey illustrates how pothos is intimately bound up with grief, absence, and love particularly well, see Homer, Odyssey 14.142–47. On pothos as a trope to describe Alexander the Great’s yearnings, see Andrew Stewart, Faces of Power: Alexander’s Image and Hellenistic Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), especially 84 n. 47, which collects the ten examples of Alexander’s pothos from Arrian.

49 Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35.43.151.

50 Victor Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 15.

51 Bettini, The Portrait of the Lover, 40.

52 On The Wisdom of Solomon and Minucius Felix’s Octavius, see Laura Salah Nasrallah, Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second-Century Church amid the Spaces of Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 222–24.

53 Aristotle, Memoria 1.450a.30.

54 Sorcha Carey, Pliny’s Catalogue of Culture: Art and Empire in the Natural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 147.

55 The classic work on the art of memory is Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). See also Mary Carruthers, Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008) and “‘Thinking in Images’: The Spatial and Visual Requirements of Cognition and Recollection in Medieval Psychology” in Signs and Symbols: Proceedings of the 2006 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. John Cherry and Ann Payne (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2009). For specifically Roman memory studies, see the work of Karl Galinsky, such as Galinsky, ed., Memoria Romana: Memory in Rome and Rome in Memory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press for the American Academy in Rome, 2014); Galinsky, ed., Memory in Ancient Rome and Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); and Galinsky and Kenneth Lapatin, eds., Cultural Memories in the Roman Empire (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2015).

56 Anonymous, Rhetorica ad Herennium 3.22.37.

57 Seneca the Younger, Ad Marciam 2.4.

58 Seneca the Younger, Ad Marciam 3.2.

59 See John Boardman et al., The Marlborough Gems: Formerly at Bleheim Palace, Oxfordshire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), no. 373; R. R. R. Smith, “Maiestas Serena: Roman Court Cameos and Early Imperial Poetry and Panegyric,” Journal of Roman Studies 111 (2021): 111, no. 14.

60 See Smith, “Maiestas Serena,” 111, no. 15 (with earlier literature).

61 A. S. Hunt and C. C. Edgar, Select Papyri, vol. 1: Private Documents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), no. 112.

62 Ovid, Tristia 1.7.5–11.

63 Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 3.

64 Belting, An Anthropology of Images, 6.

65 It is beyond this investigation to delve into the literature on scale in the classical world, but see the following examples: Elizabeth Bartman, Ancient Sculptural Copies in Miniature (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992); Elisabetta Gagetti, Preziose sculture di età ellenistica e romana (Milan: LED, 2006); Verity Platt, “Making an Impression: Replication and the Ontology of the Graeco-Roman Seal Stone,” Art History 29.2 (2006): 233–57; James I. Porter, “Against leptotes: Rethinking Hellenistic Aesthetics,” in Creating a Hellenistic World, ed. Andrew Erskine and Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2011), 271–312; Michael Squire, The Iliad in a Nutshell: Visualizing Epic on the Tabulae Iliacae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Jaś Elsner, ed., Figurines: Figuration and the Sense of Scale: Visual Conversations in Art and Archaeology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

66 Stephanie Langin-Hooper, Figurines in Hellenistic Babylonia: Miniaturization and Cultural Hybridity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 14.

67 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1984), 61, 69.

68 Andrew Hamilton, Scale and the Incas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 14–15. With thanks to Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi for pointing me to Hamilton’s work.

69 Stewart, On Longing, 56.

70 Squire, Iliad, 247.

71 Platt, “Impression,” 237.

72 This phenomenon has been observed of portrait miniatures produced over a millennium after the gold-glass portrait roundels. See Hanneke Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-century Eye Miniatures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

73 Chariton, Callirhoe 1.13.11.

74 Chariton, Callirhoe 1.14.10.

75 Chariton, Callirhoe 2.11.1.

76 AÉpigr. 2009 (2012): 98–100. The inscriptions are Année épigraphique nos. 2009,00194 and 2009,00195.

77 See Patrick R. Crowley, “Crystalline Aesthetics and the Classical Concept of the Medium,” West 86th 23 (2016), 236–37, Fig. 10, with additional references.

78 Homer, Iliad 10.436–441; Pliny, Natural History 19.11.33; Simonides, Fragment 23 West; Hesiod, Theogony 571–84.

79 This paucity is acknowledged by Christine Hunzinger, “Wonder,” in A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics, ed. Pierre Destrée and Penelope Murray (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 422 and Jessica Lightfoot, Wonder and the Marvellous from Homer to the Hellenistic World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 6. Scholarship that has been carried out on classical wonder tends to focus on its literary aspects. See, for example, Philip Hardie, ed., Paradox and the Marvelous in Augustan Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) and Karen ní Mheallaigh, Reading Fiction with Lucian: Fakes, Freaks and Hyperreality (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Historians of medieval culture, however, have long studied wonder, for example, Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2012).

80 Richard Neer, The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). See also Irene Winter, “Light and Radiance as Aesthetic Values in the Art of Ancient Mesopotamia (and some Indian Parallels),” in Art, the Integral Vision: A Volume of Essays in Felicitation of Kapila Vatsyayan, ed. Madhu Khanna, S. C. Malik, and Baidyanath Saraswati (New Dehli: D. K. Printworld, 1994), 125–29 on melammu, or Akkadian for “splendid and radiant aura.” Neer built on Winter’s work.

81 Although Neer grounds this paradigm in texts contemporary to the Greek sculptures at the heart of his study, these visual characteristics are consistently valued as wondrous well into the Roman Empire, including the period of the gold-glass portrait roundels’ manufacture. This is evident in ekphrastic descriptions of works of art in Latin that echo the prioritization of the aesthetic qualities outlined by Neer. Examples include Vergil’s description of Aeneas’s shield (Aeneid 8.626–731), Apuleius’s description of a statue group (Metamorphoses 2.4–5), and Callistratus’s ekphraseis of marble and bronze sculptures (Descriptions).

82 Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body 2, 17. 1 (4.361–2 K.), trans. Margaret Tallmadge May (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968).

83 Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality, 105.

84 Ibid., 145.

85 E. Marianne Stern, “Glass and Rock Crystal: A Multifaceted Relationship,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 10 (1997), 201; Dell’Acqua Boyvadaoğlu, “Nature and Artifice,” 97.

86 Stern “Glass and Rock Crystal,” 196.

87 There are more than sixty surviving instances in the Latin poetic corpus praising this aesthetic quality of glass. See Nicola Barham, “‘Everything Impossible’: Admiring Glass in Ancient Rome,” in New Approaches to Ancient Material Culture in the Greek & Roman World: 21st-Century Methods and Classical Antiquity, ed. C. L. Cooper (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 147.

88 Dominic Janes, God and Gold in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 140; Neer, Emergence, 99.

89 Pindar, Olympian Odes 1.1–2

90 Liz James, Light and Colour in Byzantine Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 224.

91 Cassiodorus, Variae epistulae 7.15; Philo Byzantinus, De septem orbis spectaculis 3.

92 E. Marianne Stern, “Ancient Glass in Athenian Temple Treasuries,” Journal of Glass Studies 41 (1999): 39.

93 Neer, Emergence, 102.

94 Portrait roundels bearing inscriptions literally speak through their texts. The trope of the “speaking object” in antiquity traces back to the most ancient example of writing in the Greek alphabet, the “Cup of Nestor.” See Rudolf Wachter, “The origin of epigrams on ‘speaking objects,’” in Archaic and Classical Greek Epigram, ed. Manuel Baumbach, Andrej Petrovic, Ivana Petrovic (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 250–60; Athena Kirk, “What Is an επιγραφή in Classical Greece?” in The Materiality of Text – Placement, Perception, and Presence of Inscribed Texts in Classical Antiquity, ed. Andrej Petrovic, Ivana Petrovic, and Edmund Thomas (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 29–47; Alex Mullen, “Materializing Epigraphy: Archaeological and Sociolinguistic Approaches to Roman Inscribed Spindle Whorls,” in Dynamic Epigraphy: New Approaches to Inscriptions, ed. Eleri H. Cousins (Oxford and Philadelphia, PA: Oxbow Books, 2022), 39–64.

95 Deborah Steiner emphasizes the centrality of wonder in classical thinking about art. See Steiner, “Greek and Roman Theories of Art,” in The Oxford handbook of Greek and Roman Art and Architecture, ed. Clemente Marconi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), especially 24–29.

96 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. For discussion and assessment of Gell’s influence, see Robert Maniura and Rupert Shepherd, eds., Presence: The Inherence of the Prototype within Images and Other Objects (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006); 6; Robin Osborne and Jeremy Tanner, eds., Art’s Agency and Art History (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2007), 1–27; Liana Chua and Mark Elliott, eds., Distributed Objects: Meaning and Mattering after Alfred Gell (New York: Berhgahn, 2013); Caroline van Eck, Art, Agency, and Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 19–21; Elsje van Kessel, The Lives of Paintings: Presence, Agency, and the Likeness in Venetian Art of the Sixteenth Century (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), 21–22.

97 Such as Horst Bredekamp’s notion of a Bildakt, developed in his Theorie des Bildakts (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010). With thanks to Andrew Griebeler for this reference.

98 Gell, Art and Agency, 122.

99 See Stijn Bussels, The Animated Image: Roman Theory on Naturalism, Vividness, and Divine Power (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012) and van Eck, Art, Agency for further argumentation of this position.

100 Elsner, Roman Eyes, 1 n. 1.

101 Pliny, Natural History 35.65.

102 See especially Jaś Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 88–97; Elsner, “Between Mimesis and Divine Power: Visuality in the Greco-Roman World,” in Visuality before and beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert S. Nelson, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 45–69; Elsner, Roman Eyes, 1–26.

103 Elsner, “Mimesis,” 46. On visuality as a social construction of sight, see Norman Bryson, “The Gaze in the Expanded Field,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), esp. 107.

104 Elsner, “Mimesis,” 52.

105 Ibid., 61.

106 Elsner, Roman Eyes, 24.

107 Lucian, De Dea Syria, 32.

108 Elsner, Roman Eyes, 21.

109 Plotinus, Enneads 6.9.11.18–26.

110 Elsner, Roman Eyes, 21.

111 On the deceptions of museum lighting for viewing ancient glass, see Barham, “Everything Impossible,” 136–37.

112 Michael Squire, “Introductory Reflections: Making sense of Ancient Sight,” in Sight and the Ancient Senses, ed. Michael Squire (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 9, 16; Verity Platt and Michael Squire, “Getting to Grips with Classical Art: Rethinking the Haptics of Graeco-Roman Visual Culture,” in Touch and the Ancient Senses, ed. Alex Purves (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018), 81. See also Shadi Bartsch, The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), especially 58–67.

113 Platt and Squire, “Getting to Grips,” 97.

114 While I do maintain that there is a somewhat universal character in the experience of an emotion such as grief (implying the perspective of biological essentialists in discipline of the history of emotions), I do not deny the potential for culturally specific and socially learned emotional responses. Inevitably, both strands of biological essentialist and social constructivists argumentation have draws and fallbacks, which is where an idea like William M. Reddy’s theory of the emotive can helpfully reckon the space between universalizing and localizing emotions. See Reddy, “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions,” Current Anthropology 38.3 (1997): 327–51. Jeffrey Moser usefully summarizes the positions and Reddy’s intervention; see Moser, “The Emotive Object in Medieval China,” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 6.1 (2019), especially 68–70. On archaeological approaches within the history of emotions, see Sarah Tarlow, “The Archaeology of Emotion and Affect,” Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012): 169–85. I am grateful to Jeffrey Moser for introducing me to Reddy’s emotive.

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Rachel Catherine Patt

Rachel Catherine Patt is a Mary Seeger O’Boyle postdoctoral research fellow at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University. She was previously David E. Finley predoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Intimate Encounters: Memory, Pothos, and Portraiture in the Premodern Mediterranean [Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University, 107 Scheide Caldwell House, Princeton, NJ 08544, [email protected]].