Chapter 6 “Everything impossible”: Admiring Glass in Ancient Rome
In: New Approaches to Ancient Material Culture in the Greek & Roman WorldSearch for other papers by Nicola Barham in
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Abstract
This paper argues that fine glass dining vessels were prized aesthetic objects in the ancient Roman world. Where a post-Enlightenment bias against applied visual media has allowed these glass works to go under-treated, this paper re-examines this medium through a combined methodological approach of close visual and textual analysis. Drawing upon the possibilities afforded by the development of searchable online databases of Roman texts, the paper analyses not only surviving explicit discussions of glass works (which are few), but also foregrounds references to the medium that are made in passing. It thereby identifies aesthetic emphases that only appear in brief mentions of this material, but which transpire to focus very consistently upon the same visual values. As a result, the paper proposes that works of Roman glassware were explicitly appreciated for the aesthetic effects of light mediated by their surface, both within the compass of the glass, and in the wider space around it. This conclusion is then practically applied to surviving examples of Roman glass objects to explore the visual effects that ancient lighting would have produced. Arguing that the Roman world was highly sensitive to this material’s visual allure, the paper presents a new perspective on the medium, grounded in a distinctively Roman mode of aesthetic attentiveness to this art.