©J. Paul Getty Trust
Causey, Faya. Amber and the Ancient World, Ancient Carved Ambers in the J. Paul Getty Museum
Ed. Faya Causey. Los Angeles: Getty P, 2012.
©J. Paul Getty Trust
Causey, Faya. Amber and the Ancient World, Ancient Carved Ambers in the J. Paul Getty Museum
Ed. Faya Causey. Los Angeles: Getty P, 2012. museumcatalogues.getty.edu. Web. 10 March 2014.
Amber and the Ancient World
The J. Paul Getty Museum collection of amber antiquities was formed between 1971 and 1984. Apart from the Roman Head of Medusa (figure 1), which Mr. Getty acquired as part of a larger purchase of antiquities in 1971, all the other ancient amber objects were acquired as gifts. The collection is made up primarily of pre-Roman material, but also includes a small number of Roman-period carvings, of which the Head of Medusa is the most important. The pre-Roman material includes a variety of jewelry elements that date from the seventh to the fourth centuries B.C.: fifty-six figured works and approximately twelve hundred nonfigured beads, fibulae, and pendants. This volume examines the fifty-six objects of pre-Roman date representing human, animal, and fantastic creatures, plus a modern forgery. The Getty’s nonfigured pre-Roman objects and the Roman works are not included in this catalogue.
The ambers were acquired by their donors on the international art market. The loss of any artifact’s context is immeasurable, and any attempt to discuss ambers without their original context is, to borrow an analogy from Thorkild Jacobsen, “not unlike entering the world of poetry.” Poetry plays a part in locating the cultural ambients in which the ambers of this catalogue once performed. In addition to ancient literary sources, the work here is examined via a large interdisciplinary toolkit, including art history, archaeology, philology, pharmacology, anthropology, ethnology, and the history of medicine, religion, and magic.
At a critical moment in writing this introduction, I read two of Roger Moorey’s final contributions, his 2001 Schweich Lectures, Ido