A Catalogue of the Late Antique Gold Glass in the British Museum

Abstract

• The British Museum holds one of the most extensive and important collections of Early Christian and Late Antique gold glass in Europe and the United States. With the last publication of the British Museum’s collection in 1901, this catalogue by Daniel Thomas Howells not only brings the collection up to date, but sets it within a wider historical context, questioning basic assumptions about the form, function and costs of gold glass in a fourth-century context. The book offers a reinterpretation of technical methods, workshop practices, location and distribution and is the first study to differentiate workshops on the basis of detailed iconographic analyses of individual pieces of gold glass both in the British Museum and the Vatican. Howells also provides fascinating new insights into Early Christian iconography as well as other scenes of Jewish and pagan life in Late Antiquity which have been largely overlooked in previous studies of gold glass.