The Gonzaga Cameo
Third century BC
Two profiles, a man in a helmet and a woman just behind him, are carved in white stone against a dark ground, so that they seem to float out of shadow. The man's helmet is ornamented with a serpent and a winged horse, and over his shoulder is the aegis of Zeus with the head of Medusa. The woman wears a veil and a laurel wreath. The cameo is the size of a hand, and it is one of the largest and finest carved gems to survive from the ancient world. Most scholars agree that the pair are Ptolemy the Second and his sister and wife Arsinoe the Second, rulers of Egypt in the third century BC.
The stone is sardonyx with three natural layers, and the carver used every one. The faces are cut from the pale middle layer, with the darker layer beneath showing through to make the woman's face seem to recede into shade. The helmet, hair and shield are in the upper brown layer. Look at the way the two profiles overlap, with the woman's nose exactly following the line of the man's cheek, a device that suggests both marriage and shared rule. Carving a hard stone this size took years with hand-held drills and abrasive powder, and a single slip would have ruined it.
The cameo first appears in the collection of Isabella d'Este of Mantua in the sixteenth century, hence its name from her family, the Gonzaga. It passed through the treasuries of Prague, Sweden, the Vatican and Napoleon's France before the Empress Josephine gave it to Tsar Alexander the First in 1814 in gratitude for his protection after Napoleon's fall. Notice the small chips at the edge of the stone, the scars of two thousand years of being handled, coveted and carried across Europe.
Did You Know? The Empress Josephine gave the cameo to Tsar Alexander the First in 1814, a few weeks before her death.
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