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A Roman pale grey-green glass animal-headed rhyton image 1
A Roman pale grey-green glass animal-headed rhyton image 2
Lot 129*

A Roman pale grey-green glass animal-headed rhyton

Antiquities
7 December 2021, 12:00 GMT
London, New Bond Street

£12,000 - £18,000

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A Roman pale grey-green glass animal-headed rhyton
Circa 1st Century A.D.
The horn shaped body decorated with vertical ribs, the spout in the form of a creature with short pointed horns with perforated narrow mouth, 22cm long, rim 8.1cm diam.

Footnotes

Provenance:
with Fortuna Fine Arts Ltd, New York.
Private collection, USA, formed from the 1980s onwards and acquired from the above.

Rhyta in glass are rare. Such glass rhyta as the above lot were used as drinking horns or for libations. There are two main versions of rhyta with animal horns: those with or without standing bases. As drinking vessels, this meant that the contents of the latter version, like this example, had to be drunk in one go. A fresco in Pompeii shows how a banqueteer would have raised the rhyton high above the head and poured wine in a stream into the mouth, cf. Herculaneum Museum inv. no. 9024 in M. Beretta and G. di Pasquale (ed), Vitrum. Il vetro fra arte e scienza nel mondo romano, Florence, 2004, p. 275.

It is possible that the head of this rhyton could represent a snail, since they were considered by the Romans to be an elite delicacy. The historian Pliny the Elder mentions a farmer harvesting snails, no doubt to provide dishes for wealthy banqueteers such as the one depicted in the fresco at Pompeii.

For a similar rhyton cf. Mandruzzato & Marcante (eds), Vetri Antichi del Museo Archaeologico Nazionale de Aquileia Il vasellame de mensa, 2005, p. 51 and p. 113, no. 330. There is also a footed example with horned spout, dated to 75-125 A.D., in the Corning Museum of Glass, acc. no. 87.1.2.

Additional information

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