The Schefler Collection (Lots 68-110)
Lot 83*
A Roman blue and white marbled glass unguentarium
4 December 2025, 11:00 GMT
London, New Bond Street£2,000 - £3,000
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Joanna van der Lande
Consultant
Siobhan Quin
Senior Specialist
Anna Marston
Associate Specialist
A Roman blue and white marbled glass unguentarium
Early Imperial Rome, late 1st Century B.C. - early 1st Century A.D.
8.3cm high
8.3cm high
Footnotes
Provenance:
with Gideon Sasson Ancient Art Ltd., Jerusalem.
Schefler Collection, New York, acquired from the above before 2000.
This small colour band unguentarium belongs to an early imperial Roman group of glass that forms the link between mosaic and blown glass. It is made from prefabricated lengths of opaque glass ribbons in transparent blue that were gathered on a blowpipe, inflated and shaped. This unguentarium, however, presents a further enigma in that the top of its neck and mouth is missing. At present it is unclear whether this was cut off in antiquity following some form of accident to preserve this valuable vessel or whether it originally had a separate detachable neckpiece made from a different piece of glass. For Hellenistic gold-band alabastra from the 1st Century B.C. with detachable monochrome neckpieces from the Julien Gréau Collection now in the Metropolitan Museum (obj. no. 17.194.286a, b), and the Ernesto Wolf Collection now in Stuttgart, cf. A. Oliver Jr., "Late Hellenistic Glass in the Metropolitan Museum", Journal of Glass Studies 9, 1967, pp. 20–22, no. 3, fig. 12, and E.M. Stern and B. Schlick-Nolte, Early Glass of the Ancient World. 1600 B.C. - A.D. 50. Ernesto Wolf Collection (Verlag Gerd Hatje, Ostfildern), 1994, pp. 302-6, no. 88 respectively.