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In 1910, a lidded glass vase (ace. no. 10.21 0.36a, b, Fig. 1 ) was acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art through the agency of John Marshall from the dealer Ettore Jandolo, who is said to have obtained the piece from the 1892 sale of the collector Giuseppe Pacini of Florence. The sale catalog, which includes a photograph of the vase on an elaborate marble stand, describes it as a cinerary urn and states that if was found during excavations near Taranto in 1880.1 It was therefore accepted as a genuine antiquity of Roman date.
Early references to the vase in publications of the Metropolitan Museum are either uninformative or misleading. Gisela Richter, for example, described it as "painted with enamel colors."2 Gustavus Eisen was unclear when he referred to it as made of "stratified glass strips fused in the matrix," but he seems to have thought that it was made of marbled mosaic cast glass. However, Eisen was clearly wrong in giving the provenance of the piece as "said to have been found near Turin."3
Throughout the early 20th century, the vase was prominently displayed among the Roman glass in the Department of Greek and Roman Art, and it was featured as belonging to the Roman period in a 1936 exhibition that highlighted the Metropolitan Museum's comprehensive collections of glass.4 It was not until 1983 that its authenticity as an ancient Roman cinerary urn was seriously questioned by Dr. Kurt Luckner, curator of ancient art at The Toledo Museum of Art. The vase was then identified as a piece of 19th-century Venetian glass, and it was promptly transferred to the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, where it has resided ever since. Apparently, however, the piece cannot shed its past. It was included in the "Achatglas" category of late Hellenistic and early Roman cast glass in the handbook on ancient glass by the renowned specialist Axel von Saldern.5 It is time to set the record straight.
The vase and lid are a matching pair, made of translucent purple glass with applied marvered opaque white trails. Both are blown; pontil marks are visible on the bottom of the vase and on the top of the inside of the lid. Eight broad and thick...