Free-blown in translucent, yellow-green glass with cobalt-blue glass handle and trail. The bulbous body has six pincered ribs each forming a figure-of-eight pattern, a band of cobalt-blue trail beneath the flared mouth, the blue glass handle drawn from the top of the body and folded at the rim to form a thumb-rest, slight indentation to the base. Intact.
To create the figure-of-eight pattern, a typical decorative motif of glass production centred around Cologne, thick threads of glass were added to the surface then tooled into shape, and reheated so that they melted into the body of the glass and become one with it.
The dark blue handle on this example would suggest an earlier date, although one found in the cemetery along the Severin Strasse, Cologne, now in the Römisch-Germanisches Museum, is dated to the 3rd century AD.
Provenance
Fortuna Fine Arts, Ltd, New York, USAPrivate collection, the Netherlands; acquired from the above 15th January 2003, collection number 141
Literature
For the form compare Susan H. Auth, Ancient Glass at the Newark Museum (Newark, 1976), no.106Also compare Fritz Fremersdorf, Römische Gläser mit Fadenauflage in Köln, Die Denkmäler des Römischen Köln V (Cologne, 1959), p.72, no.104, pl.111
