Footnotes

• Provenance:
  Ex British Rail Pension Fund Collection, London
  
  On Loan:
  The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, 1985-1995
  
  Published:
  Grose 1989, p.187, fig.94
  Stern and Schlick-Nolte 1994, p.97, fig.176
  Sotheby’s 1997, pp.40-41, lot 14
  
  Literature:
  This fine two-handled footed cup or skyphos belongs to the earliest documented class of Hellenistic cast glass tablewares dating from the late 3rd to 2nd Century B.C., examples of which have been found in Greece and Magna Graecia (cf. Grose 1989, pp.185-90). Heavily influenced by contemporary ceramics and silver forms, these luxury glasses were often also decorated with lathe-cut bands of grooves and, as on this example, with cut basal mouldings, which mirror those found on silver pieces.
  
  Hellenistic glass of this period is best known from several large tomb groups from Canosa (ancient Canusium) near the Adriatic coast of southern Italy, the most famous of which are preserved in the British Museum (cf. Harden 1968 and Tatton-Brown 2002). Among these finds, which are believed to have come from a single tomb, is a winged handled skyphos very similar to this example (ibid. p.92, fig.4 on p.93). Another similar piece, now in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg; was found in 1900 at Akhtanizovskaya, Krasnodat region (Kunina 1997, p.259, no.59). The distinctive bell-shaped foot may also be found on an extraordinary lidded amphora with gilded copper ornaments reputedly found at Olbia on the Black Sea and now in Antikenmuseum, Berlin (Platz-Horster 1976, pp.16-20). It also occurs on handless bowls or kraters with outsplayed rims, cf. Grose 1989, p.198, no.183 for an example in the Toledo Museum of Art allegedly found in Italy and dated to the mid - to late 3rd Century B.C., while Marianne Stern believes that another example without provenance, formerly in the Ernesto Wolf Collection, was not made before 150 B.C. (Stern and Schlick-Nolte 1994, pp.103-4, pp.258-61, no.68).