By the 1st century AD, the technique of glass-blowing had revolutionised the art of glass-making. The new technique allowed craftsmen to use smaller amounts of glass for each vessel and obtain much thinner walls, so enabling the creation of small medicine, incense, and perfume containers in new forms. New shapes allowed greater control over the liquid dispensed, and glass was the material of choice for storing the oils because it was not porous. These small glass bottles are found frequently at Hellenistic and Roman sites, especially in cemeteries, and the perfumes which filled them would have been gathered from all corners of the expansive Roman Empire. Cosmetic jars, such as this piece, were made through the glass blowing process, which involved using a hollow clay or metal tube to gather molten glass into a sphere. By blowing air inside it, the glass worker created a hollow sphere, which would have been then stretched with the aid of gravity and metal tools into the desired shape. The trailing on this piece would have been achieved by a single piece of molten glass, carefully administered – or ‘trailed’ – across the piece and adjusted with tweezers. The evenness and lack of tool marks make this trailing a particularly impressive example.
To discover more about glass wares used to store cosmetics and ointments, please visit our relevant blog post: Roman Glass: Unguentaria and Cosmetics.
