AQUILEIA

PATRIMONIO DELL'UMANITÀ

venerdì 19 aprile 2024

Room VII.2, the colored glass box

Scatola dai bagliori dorati presso il Museo Archeologico Nazionale ad Aquileia, Courtesy of Museo archeologico nazionale di Aquileia | Foto: © Gianluca Baronchelli
A small multicolored box is the testimony of the expertise achieved by Aquileian artisans in glass processing as early as the 1st century AD. Discovered in 1911 in a women's tomb in the north-east of the city, the elegant box was intended to contain cosmetics and beauty creams.

The refined technique with which it was made involved the combination of glass canes of different colors and ribbons in gold leaf, that ignite the blue and the green of precious glows.

Probably handed down as a precious family asset, the box is a document of the importance of glass in the craftsmanship and trade of Aquileia, at a time when, as Pliny the Elder tells us, this material had reached a prestige equal to that of gold and silver.

Work of art - National Archaeological Museum of Aquileia