Sandwiched Faces
Resemblance and remembrance in glass.
The man I married wants to ingest a bit of radioactive iron a while before he dies. Then I’m to scatter his ashes on the ground outside, and in the months and years that follow, use a Geiger counter to see him still alive in plants. The radioactive atoms of what was once his blood might look something like this.
True ghost machines, these counters also make sounds, and I’d be able to listen to him clicking away in hungry rosebushes.
Surely there are nicer ways of being with the dead.
Back in late antiquity, third- and fourth-century inhabitants of Rome preferred burial to cremation. Disused quarries filled up with bodies, the graves not safely in the ground but dug into the walls of soft tufa. Hundreds of thousands of Romans of different persuasions were buried in the poorly lit rooms and corridors of the catacombs.
Tourists have left mixed reviews. Jerome, not yet a saint, describes his visits in the year 354 as “walking in darkness like that of Hell”. Still, decoration was ongoing.
The catacomb walls have paintings like this fourth-century one from the Via Latina, of the earth goddess Tellus lounging amongst her own rosebushes. As for the hole-in-the-wall graves, they were decorated with shiny bric-a-brac, from animal teeth and shells to inexpensive jewellery and coins.
Sometimes, portraits were stuck into the drying plaster of grave fronts.
Such “gold-glass” portraits are made of two pieces of glass fused together, with figures etched into the gold foil sandwiched between them. These portrait medallions are small, many of the figures roughly the size of a passport photograph. Not very much gold at all was needed to cut this pair into being.
Encircling them are their names. This is Constantia and Orfitus, a fourth-century Roman wife and husband, together with Hercules. Standing between them, the conqueror of the underworld seems to have brought this pair together, but in a number of other gold glasses the little middleman is Christ himself.
In some cases, the couples are joined by their offspring instead, though really only two kids fit comfortably into the family picture.
Apart from the inclusion of the subjects' names and their gods or heroes, gold-glass portraits are mostly of the stock variety. For a wife and husband, Constantia and Orfitus share an unlikely number of facial features, and Constantia’s hairstyle and painted-on jewels look much like those worn by many other fourth-century women in glass.
As they often do, the signs and symbols of status trump individuality, and many of these once-loved loved-ones look much the same. But a few don’t.
Tools about the size of a pin, and probably also a magnifying lens, went into making the portraits of this woman and this man.
Innumerable tiny cuts in the gold add up to what can only be a real individual's face. Scrutinising their subjects, scratching and stippling, third-century gold-glass makers explored all of the potential of the single sharp line — as Rembrandt also would in etchings of his own, easily recognisable mug.
The ancient faces can also look familiar, their direct gaze and the specificity of their features making you think they might be someone you know from somewhere.
Not everyone is young and beautiful. Some of the portrayed look to be getting on in age (when 45 was cheating death). But other than what these silent faces might say to us as viewers, we know next to nothing of their particular circumstances, how they lived, or what exactly they believed. This geezer with an instrument tucked under his arm may have been a musician.
Around the woman above is Latin that doesn’t identify her, but rather the man in her life, Anatolius. Before it presumably marked her grave, this gold glass must have been a portrait made for Anatolius, reminding him to “rejoice” (gaudeas).
In the most ancient of ancient Greek novels, the first-century Callirhoe by Chariton, its heroine presses a portrait of her presumed-dead husband to her pregnant belly, telling her unborn child, “I shall bear you in the likeness of your father”. When her son is born, he does indeed turn out, in his mother’s words, “the image of my dear husband”.
Despite their immediacy and seeming familiarity, these portraits come from a time different from ours, in how it saw both proof of fatherhood and the power of a likeness to make the absent present.
It seems too early to say whom the boy in this glass resembles. Still a toddler, he’s not yet quite grown into the large pendant around his neck, meant to keep him safe until puberty.
The older siblings in a gold glass now tacked onto a medieval cross in Brescia look the image of their mother.
It must be the mother on the right. She wears patterned silk and, like Constantia, her best jewels. Her teenage daughter just behind her is more simply adorned, with a good deal of makeup. Although no one can agree on what it means, the inscription above this family group suggests they were not originally from Italy, but from Greek-speaking Alexandria.
Of course, Egypt had its own funerary-portrait traditions.
Paintings like the one of this third-century Fayum man were fastened to the wrappings of mummies. But they must have been painted from life. John Berger writes of their making: “the sitter had not yet become a model, and the painter had not yet become a broker for future glory. Instead, the two of them, living at that moment, collaborated in a preparation for death, a preparation which would ensure survival”.
The gold-glass portraits have a similarly intimate feel. But they were not meant — or not only meant — for use in death.
Here are Gregory and his wife, alive in third-century Rome. As the jagged edges around them suggest, this pair once belonged to something larger, possibly a drinking cup made to celebrate their wedding. These two look a bit old to be just getting married — she is well past her teens. Perhaps it was a second marriage for both, or their anniversary.
When the cup was drunk from, their glittering faces at its bottom would appear, along with the message: “Gregory, drink and drink to thine”. It must have been shattered with care only once Gregory died, his portrait left with him for perpetuity.
Gregory’s gold glass was found in the catacomb of Panfilo in 1926, and brought to the Vatican for display. I saw it there on a boiling August day a few summers ago, the fans buzzing in the Sala del Museo Cristiano, a woman standing by an open window, talking quickly and loudly on her phone. Stuck in glass cases lining this long corridor of a room, the gold-glass figures remained undisturbed. Their graves robbed, their portraits once rejected as fakes, and now mostly ignored by tourists hurrying past to bigger things, they endure.
I thought that these tiny gold portraits were wonderful. Just more that we missed on our frenetic trips OS.
Some of these portraits are exquisitely beautiful. I loved seeing them. Even more, I love the way you notice them, stashed away in a museum as distracted people hurry by, and share them with us. You help us appreciate being alive.