The Portland Vase
About 1 to 25 AD
A small vase of deep blue glass carries figures in white that seem to float on its surface like a cameo brooch. Around the body, two scenes unfold. On one side a young man is led by a winged Cupid towards a seated woman who holds a sea serpent, while a bearded man looks on. On the other, a woman reclines on a pile of rocks holding a torch, between a young man and a woman with a sceptre. The figures are quiet and beautiful, and nobody agrees who they are: the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, the parents of Achilles, is the most common guess.
The vase was made by dipping a bubble of blue glass into molten white glass, then carving the cold white layer away with the tools of a gem cutter, leaving the figures standing in relief. Where the white is thinnest, the blue shows through and gives the shadows, so that the flesh seems modelled. It took a master craftsman perhaps two years. Look at the trees and the drapery, thinner than paper, and at the disc on the base, which came from another vessel and was added in antiquity.
The vase was reported in Rome in sixteen hundred and passed through the Barberini family, then Sir William Hamilton, then the Duchess of Portland. The potter Josiah Wedgwood borrowed it and after years of trials produced his famous black and white copies. In eighteen forty five a drunken visitor smashed it into more than two hundred pieces; it has been restored three times since, most recently in nineteen eighty nine, when the pieces were put together with modern adhesives. The museum bought it in nineteen forty five, and it remains the finest surviving example of Roman cameo glass.
Did You Know? The vase was smashed in eighteen forty five by a visitor who had been drinking for a week, and a small hidden box of leftover fragments turned up decades later to help the last restoration.
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