Julio-Claudian rule
Augustus founded the first imperial house. Claudius began the harbour at Portus, tying imperial power to the sea routes that carried vitrum across the empire.
Collections · 01
Annealed
A Roman 1st century A.D. vitrum centrepiece, and the 18k gold ring built around it.
The construction
Nothing is added to the vitrum.
The gold holds it, and stops. Three entries go into the record, so that what is ancient and what is ours never blur.
01 · The centrepiece
Roman vitrum
One piece, 1st century A.D. Material, date, measurement, condition and provenance are documented before anything is built around it.
02 · The hold
Two points of gold
Two 18k retainers, one at each end. Nothing across the middle. The vitrum stays visible front and back.
03 · The ring
Built around it
The band is drawn to the chosen piece, not the piece fitted to a band. No two come out the same.
From the drawing board
A setting begins on paper.
Proportion is settled before the vitrum is chosen: where it sits, how far the gold reaches, how much of it is deliberately left uncovered.
- i
The size comes first.
The measurement arrives with the order, and everything after it follows from that number. Paper stays blank until the hand is known.
- ii
The element is chosen for that hand.
Each ancient vitrum carries its own dimensions, a millimetre apart from the next. The one that suits the size goes to the bench, so the proportion between the vitrum and the finger it sits on is settled before a line is drawn.
- iii
The drawing is made around the element itself.
The vitrum is measured and traced at scale: the reach of the two retainers, the height they stand at, the curve where the gold meets the ancient face.
- iv
The gold is raised around it.
Eighteen carat, worked around the chosen element and closed to the chosen size. Band and vitrum leave the bench as one object.
Chosen for one hand. Drawn for one element. Built once.
The original work
Vitrum, a unique piece of Roman jewellery.
It was made to be worn, and it was. It survives with a softened surface, small losses and the weathering of centuries. Those marks are the evidence. They stay in view.
Annealed: cooled slowly in the kiln so that it would not crack. One step, taken by one workshop, two thousand years ago. It is the reason the piece is still here, and it is what this ring is named for.
The wearer
Rome wore its glass on the hand.
A cylinder of this kind reached the hand through the houses that commissioned painted walls, bronze mirrors and caskets of ivory. In the early Empire colour held in glass carried standing, and it was worn where standing is read: on the hand that offers, receives and gestures.
The Metropolitan Museum keeps a Roman glass finger ring of the same century, drawn, tooled and trailed in one operation, catalogued at 2.3 cm across. It entered New York with the Morgan glass in 1917 and it has stood in a vitrine since. The ring built here is the same object with somewhere else to go.
Read the museum record ↗The 1st century A.D.
The empire changed hands. The furnaces did not.
A 1st century A.D. attribution spans Rome’s first two imperial dynasties. Emperors rose and fell, a civil war ran through a single year, a volcano buried two cities. The workshops kept working.
Four emperors
Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian followed one another through a single year of civil war.
Flavian rule
The Colosseum opened under Titus. Vesuvius sealed Pompeii and Herculaneum into the archaeological record.
Nerva and Trajan
The Nerva–Antonine sequence opened and carried Rome into the 2nd century.
A work from the period
The same evidence, in New York.
This cup was blown in a four-part mould during the Julio-Claudian period. Inscription, vine scrolls, columns and fluting came out of a single operation.
The technique appears in the first decades of the 1st century A.D. and crosses the empire within a generation. The Met’s cup is a dated anchor for the century. Our vitrum is dated on its own material, condition and provenance. Never on the museum’s.
Read the museum record ↗One sea
Everything moved by water.
Roman vitrum belonged to a connected Mediterranean, from the eastern provinces to the western empire. The map gives the century its scale. It does not give this piece a birthplace, and we will not pretend otherwise.
Historical context · 1st century A.D.
The record
The record separates old from new.
SeriesCollections · 01
NameAnnealed
The centrepieceRoman vitrum · 1st century A.D.
The setting18k yellow gold · made to order
Object typeRing
Price€850
Each one is built around its own vitrum.
The Arrivals
The next object is already being examined.
Pieces are found one at a time, and only the intact ones are catalogued. Subscribers see each arrival first, with its record, its condition and its price.