Group of Checkerboard Patterned Inlays
Ptolemaic Period, (1st century BCE)
- Medium
- Glass, mosaic technique
- Classification
- Decorative Arts
- Dimensions
- Ea: 1.5 × 1.8 × 25 cm (5/8 × 11/16 × 1/8 in.)
- Culture
- Italy
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Arts of Africa
- Credit line
- Gift of Theodore W. and Frances S. Robinson
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
In ancient Rome, there was a high demand for colorful glass that could dazzle banquet guests alongside the expensive silver and gold serving wares meant to impress. Fragments like this one would have once been a part of larger mosaic dishes. The mosaic pattern was made by sagging molten glass into bowl-shaped molds, a technique used on many of these fragments is similar to millefiori, “thousand flowers” in Italian, a modern glass-making method in which tiny rods of colored glass are bundled together, wrapped in a sheet of glass, fused, and then thinly sliced to reveal swirls of a flower-like patterns. They were arranged side by side, sometimes together with bits of colored glass, and fused together with heat.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
