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https://twitter.com/DrSueOosthuizen/status/1254010781672275969?s=20
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Apr 25, 2020 14:01
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| # ? May 23, 2024 22:57 |
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 flipppped
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Apr 25, 2020 17:17
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Surprisingly crude-looking carving tbh given the rare material.
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Apr 25, 2020 21:31
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is it backwards because it's carved on the obverse? if so, imagine the flopsweat of the artisan when they realize they did it backwards
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Apr 25, 2020 21:51
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It's a seal ring, so you're using it to stamp documents/make wax seals.
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Apr 25, 2020 21:52
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ohhhh of course, neat
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Apr 25, 2020 22:01
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Scarodactyl posted:Surprisingly crude-looking carving tbh given the rare material. That's something that always amazes me about jewlers and sculptors. There's gotta be some stumbling blocks while they were learning or just bad days.
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Apr 25, 2020 22:12
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It's not really crude, it's just the style of the era. We value the realism of classical art and disdain the stylized flat art of late antiquity because of our own cultural biases.
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Apr 25, 2020 22:20
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Late Roman art doesn't always look so flat as that. consular diptychs for example are highly stylized without being as cartoonish as that signet   But we should consider 1) a signet ring is TINY and working any design in something that small with primitive tools must be really hard, 2) Alaric was not nearly as well funded or helped as the men who commissioned the diptychs above.
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Apr 25, 2020 22:26
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It requires much less time and skill to execute a basic carving than an elaborate one, like eg this beauty recovered in Pompeii. I don't think that's just cultural bias. Sapphire (in the modern sense--they probably meant what we call lapis when they said sapphire) was rather uncommon in the region, since as far as we know the main mines of the era were in Sri lanka. There may have been other sources too (the pictured carving above is a 'basaltic' sapphire, from a different kind of deposit than what you find in Sri Lanka, and the authors of the paper it's from think it might be African) but nothing too productive. Sapphire is hard stuff and carving it would have been a real drag at the time, maybe the artist was used to typical softer materials like agate. Scarodactyl fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Apr 25, 2020 |
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Apr 25, 2020 22:29
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I mean, sometimes you want photorealism (or as close as you can get) and sometimes you just want art. Like, in modern society, we could easily have the seal of the united states be a photoshopped eagle for ultra-realism, but it's still a stylized drawing.
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Apr 25, 2020 22:32
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skasion posted:But we should consider 1) a signet ring is TINY and working any design in something that small with primitive tools must be really hard, 2) Alaric was not nearly as well funded or helped as the men who commissioned the diptychs above. Also, it was made from Sapphire. Aluminium oxide is really, really hard.
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Apr 25, 2020 22:35
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cheetah7071 posted:I mean, sometimes you want photorealism (or as close as you can get) and sometimes you just want art. Like, in modern society, we could easily have the seal of the united states be a photoshopped eagle for ultra-realism, but it's still a stylized drawing.  Weirdo.
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Apr 25, 2020 22:36
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I'm actually going to back up for a second and say while the carving is pretty basic the polish on the sapphire looks impressive. I assume emery was the grit of choice for carving since diamond likely wasn't that available (my timeline for that is a bit fuzzy though) but I'm not sure what they'd have used for polish, unless they had very fine emery. Silicates (ie agate, emerald etc) are much easier thanks to their softness and ability to take a chemical polish from oxides.
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Apr 25, 2020 22:43
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I'm gonna back even further up and say the whole concept of the piece is a mistake. These rings exist to stamp reliefs in wax. By making it an art object out of sapphire you're asking for strong relief in some of the hardest material in the ancient world. Also it should look beautiful, but can't be faceted or polished normally because the surface can't be smoothed. Sapphire is just the wrong material for the piece. Make the sapphire into a nice ring and make the carving from moonstone or jet.
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Apr 25, 2020 23:52
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It's like looking at current day pixel art that mimics the style of 80's video games and sadly shaking your head about how our civilization has declined from its previous peak.
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Apr 25, 2020 23:57
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:It's like looking at current day pixel art that mimics the style of 80's video games and sadly shaking your head about how our civilization has declined from its previous peak. (A lot of today's complaints are about stuff that has a pretty surface understanding of what the 80s era graphics actually looked like and why they looked that way, again an issue of lower skill work within a very particular subdiscipline.) I'm not just calling it 'crude' because it's a simpler less dynamic image (or becsuse zi like it less), but because it looks like very basic work probably done with basic grit-loaded 'drills' and then not further refined--lots of stubby lines and round points. It makes me think this was not an artistic decision but a limit on what the artist could execute. But hell maybe they all looked like that on purpose in Alaric's time. Scarodactyl fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Apr 26, 2020 |
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Apr 26, 2020 00:10
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Arglebargle III posted:I'm gonna back even further up and say the whole concept of the piece is a mistake. These rings exist to stamp reliefs in wax. By making it an art object out of sapphire you're asking for strong relief in some of the hardest material in the ancient world. Also it should look beautiful, but can't be faceted or polished normally because the surface can't be smoothed. he was the king though
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Apr 26, 2020 00:11
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Maybe this artist was just an idiot tho.
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Apr 26, 2020 00:16
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Arglebargle III posted:Maybe this artist was just an idiot tho. Maybe the reason this one was found because it had been thrown away since it was old and beat up after having been used a few thousand times. It was a tool, not a work of art.
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Apr 26, 2020 00:17
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Arglebargle III posted:Maybe this artist was just an idiot tho.
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Apr 26, 2020 00:17
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I dunno man sapphire v wax I don't see the wax winning.
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Apr 26, 2020 00:18
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Scarodactyl posted:Actually I'm not just a lapidary and gem enthusiast but also a professional pixel artist. Bring it on. I like this post and I think it expresses something i was feeling too, but couldn't put into words. It's not like I want to go back to the old theory of the "dark ages," but not all change in art is always intentional or to something more advanced. I would bet the number of luxury artisans shrank in late antiquity with the empire, and that as the Mediterranean trade network broke down they became even fewer.
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Apr 26, 2020 03:05
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZnaCel6LdU Since there doesn't seem to be an early modem history thread I posted this here. A Japanese primary source describing first contact with two European merchants. Like the American contact, the natives immediately apprehend the implications of European technology.
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Apr 26, 2020 04:31
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Regarding the ring, the lettering is poorly spaced and in some instances poorly formed (L). This indicates to me that the artist was limited in her ability to produce something more advanced. Scarodactyl, what's known about that hippogriff? It sure is beautiful.
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Apr 26, 2020 07:59
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It's actually a hippocampus (the other, less tusky water horse). There's a nice free gemological article about the piece here: https://www.ssef.ch/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/2019_Krzemnicki_sapphire_Roman.pdf One fun fact: it's a blue sapphire, but it isn't a blue body color like a normal blue sapphire. Very fine crystal inclusions of rutile (titanium oxide) scatter light, bouncing back short-wavelength blue but allowing longer wavelengths to pass. This broad class of sapphire has gotten rare because they figured out in the 80s that you can heat them at high temperatures (much higher than the low-temp treatments Pliny recorded) to make the sapphire reabsorb the rutile, clearing up the milkiness and possibly getting the newly-introduced Ti to link up with iron impurities already in the sapphire, generating a rich blue body color. Parts of their analysis are great, others a bit odd--it seems like they're conflating the modern nation of Ethiopia with classical 'Ethiopia' (which in my limited understanding sort of meant anywhere in Africa where dark-skinned people lived? Or is that bunk?) Though (modern) Ethiopia has emerged as a source of quality sapphires, so their guess that is is from there may be right anyway even with the handwaving of that distinction. Scarodactyl fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Apr 26, 2020 |
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Apr 26, 2020 08:13
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"Ethiopia" might be referring to Aksum, in this case?
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Apr 26, 2020 09:18
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Kassad posted:"Ethiopia" might be referring to Aksum, in this case? aksum was mostly in modern Sudan and Eritrea, and the regions of Ethiopia which produce sapphire wasn’t part of it.
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Apr 26, 2020 10:38
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SlothfulCobra posted:What do you even do with a bag of stone dicks Slings come to mind. Beautiful slings...
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Apr 26, 2020 11:50
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PawParole posted:and the regions of Ethiopia which produce sapphire wasn’t part of it. The article claims otherwise?
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Apr 26, 2020 18:30
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Power Khan posted:Slings come to mind. Beautiful slings... Slings and spears the most underrepresented weapons in popular culture
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Apr 27, 2020 05:55
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PawParole posted:aksum was mostly in modern Sudan and Eritrea, and the regions of Ethiopia which produce sapphire wasn’t part of it. I mean even if the Ethiopian Highlands weren't part of Aksum, I really doubt Roman merchants were like the Shane Company, cutting out the middlemen to the source of the sapphires.
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Apr 27, 2020 06:09
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Apr 27, 2020 16:49
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Dupondius isn't angry, just disappointed.
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Apr 27, 2020 19:20
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Siliqua is quite surprised to be a coin.
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Apr 27, 2020 19:32
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Are there any video games of any genre for any platform that are set either during the reign of Alexander the Great or during the immediate aftermath of his death?
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Apr 27, 2020 19:50
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Are there any video games of any genre for any platform that are set either during the reign of Alexander the Great or during the immediate aftermath of his death? the original rome: total war has an expansion based on him and paradox's imperator is set in 304 BC (so 19 years after his death) this is not a recommendation for either of those games, I haven't played either
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Apr 27, 2020 19:57
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Are there any video games of any genre for any platform that are set either during the reign of Alexander the Great or during the immediate aftermath of his death? Field of Glory: Empires starts in 310 BC.
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Apr 27, 2020 22:19
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Are there any video games of any genre for any platform that are set either during the reign of Alexander the Great or during the immediate aftermath of his death? There’s the Diadochi Kings mod for Crusader Kings 2, but it’s in beta. As you would expect, it starts immediately after his death.
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Apr 27, 2020 22:57
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This is pretty cool. What is the purchasing power of one (gold?) coin? Would a day laborer be unable to afford even one?
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Apr 28, 2020 12:40
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