LOT 0797

Eastern Roman Gold Hoop Earrings with Stone Inlays

3RD-4TH CENTURY A.D.

1 1/2 in. (9.26 grams total, 37-38 mm).

Each with a hollow-formed crescentic hoop, piriform plaque with inset glass panel and granulated border, hollow-bulb cluster beneath with three applied piriform plaques and granule finial. [2]

Acquired in the mid 1980s-1990s.
Private collection, Switzerland, thence by descent.
Private collection, since the late 1990s.

This lot has been checked against the Interpol Database of stolen works of art and is accompanied by a search certificate number no.12393-226929.

Cf. The Metropolitan Museum, New York, accession number 08.251.5, .6, for earrings in similar style.

As a result of the expansion of the Roman Empire, jewellery became more and more elaborate in its designs and materials used, such as precious and semi-precious gemstones. This pair of earrings represent a highly baroque evolution of the boat-shaped type, already visible in Etruscan jewellery and certainly in Roman jewellery, as demonstrated by the excavations of Herculaneum. Using the body of the boat-shaped earrings, the late Imperial artist added decorative clusters and applications of pearled borders and precious stones, according to the taste of Eastern Hellenism rooted for centuries in the provinces of the Black Sea and Roman Asia.