A GREEK CHALCEDONY SCARABOID ON ITS ORIGINAL GOLD CHAIN

CLASSICAL PERIOD, CIRCA LATE 5TH CENTURY B.C.

Details

A GREEK CHALCEDONY SCARABOID ON ITS ORIGINAL GOLD CHAIN
CLASSICAL PERIOD, CIRCA LATE 5TH CENTURY B.C.
Engraved with a profile head of a woman, her hair wrapped in a sakkos, with delicate wavy strands flowing over its edge at the forehead and projecting out behind, the sakkos embellished with a lightly hatched band, wearing elaborate pendant earrings, her face with a large profile eye beneath a modelled brow, with a straight nose, fleshy lips and a full chin, enclosed within a hatched border, a plain wire threaded through the perforation and looped to the terminals of a long complex loop-in-loop chain, the terminals of tapering cylindrical form, bordered on the broad ends with beaded wire between plain wire, and at the thin end with twisted wire between plain wire, the sides with filigree volutes punctuated by large and small granules
Scaraboid: 7/8 in. (2.2 cm.) long
Chain: 22 in. (55.8 cm.) long

Provenance

Acquired by the previous owner in the early 1960s.

Lot Essay

For the treatment of the earrings and the hair emerging from the sakkos compare the sard scarab engraved with the head of an African woman, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, no. 52 in Beazley, The Lewes House Collection of Ancient Gems.
The finest coins from the late 5th century exhibit this same style. See for example the head of Arethusa on a Syracusan tetradrachm signed by the engraver Euainetos, no. 395 in Jenkins, Ancient Greek Coins. Jenkins notes (p. 161) that Euainetos's masterpiece shows an "elegant sophistication and rich treatment of detail combined with a minute delicacy and restraint ... The sensitively modelled face is well set off by the free yet orderly arrangement of the hair..."

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