Among the most singular objects bequeathed by late-antique Rome to posterity are the fondi d'oro — the bases of cups and dishes whose decoration, executed in engraved gold leaf, was imprisoned between two layers of glass. A fraction of this corpus — the most precious for the historian of diasporas — bears the emblems of Judaism: the seven-branched menorah, the Torah ark, the lulav, the shofar, the etrog. These discs, torn from their original vessels, were repurposed to mark and adorn the tombs of the Jewish catacombs of the City. In the catacombs of Rome, Jews placed gilded glass discs depicting the menorah and the Torah ark upon their graves, along with symbols of the festival of Sukkot, in the same manner as Christians placed there discs showing saints.
This Great Book sets out to trace, insofar as archives and scholarship permit, the history of these objects: their technique, their function, their iconography, the funerary contexts that preserved them, and finally the extraordinary modern trajectory of their discovery, their collection, and sometimes their spoliation. The "Probable" status of this introduction signals from the outset that, behind the well-established materiality of the glasses, uncertainties remain: regarding their precise dating, the exact use of the cups from which they derive, and the identity of the Jewish families who commissioned them.
Gold-glass objects constitute a characteristic production of Rome in the 3rd and 4th centuries of our era. According to the catalogues of the Vatican's Christian Museum, this particular glassmaking production was carried out in Rome during the 3rd and especially the 4th centuries AD; prized objects offered on public and private occasions, gold-glass pieces were found primarily in the catacombs, where, repurposed to adorn tombs, they were fixed with the mortar sealing the loculi. The material itself combined costly elements: glass, gold leaf, sometimes combined with silver leaf and, on certain examples, enamel details.
The scale of the preserved corpus gives a measure of the phenomenon. Among the most remarkable and iconographically significant objects surviving from 4th-century Rome are the dishes and cups of "gold glass": nearly five hundred fragmentary examples have been discovered, the great majority in the Roman catacombs. Yet what survives is almost never the complete vessel. For the most part, only the circular bases remain, with their images in cut and incised gold leaf sandwiched between two layers of clear or green-tinted glass, having been set into the plaster of the walls that sealed the burials. This technical detail governs all the rest: if these objects have come down to us, it is precisely because they were detached from their containers and embedded in funerary masonry.
The technique, often referred to in Italian as fondo d'oro and in English as sandwich gold glass, involved enclosing a worked gold leaf between two layers of glass. The goldsmith would apply a thin sheet of gold to a glass disc, engrave the design and inscriptions into it with a stylus, then cover the whole with a second layer of molten glass that sealed and protected the decoration. This "sandwich" engraving of the gold leaf accounts for the fineness of the line and the remarkable preservation of the golden brilliance on objects more than sixteen centuries old. The iconography of a typical example reveals the richness of this visual language: the Jewish gold glass features, in its upper section, two lions of the tribe of Judah flanking an ark of the Torah; below, two menorahs, a shofar (ram's horn), an etrog (citron), a lulav (date palm frond), and other objects associated with the celebration of Sukkot.
The identification of each detail nevertheless remains a delicate matter. Not all of the tiny symbols can be identified with certainty. This philological caution applies to the corpus as a whole: the reading of secondary emblems, accessory liturgical objects, or the architectural elements of the ark frequently belongs to the realm of scholarly interpretation rather than documentary certainty.
The iconography of Jewish gold glasses is not mere decoration: it articulates a theology of Memory. The symbols invoked — menorah, ark, lulav, shofar, etrog — refer simultaneously to the cult of the destroyed Temple and to the liturgical cycle of the Jewish year. Just as Christians placed glass discs depicting saints, Jews placed images of the menorah and the ark of the Torah on their tombs; all these images make reference to the destroyed Temple.
It is at this point that tradition and archive speak to one another. The menorah, the candelabrum of the sanctuary of Jerusalem, becomes under the Empire the preeminent sign of diasporic Jewish identity; the depicted ark, sometimes framed by heraldic lions, transposes into image the lost furnishings of the Temple; the lulav, the etrog, and the shofar inscribe the burial within the rhythm of the festivals — Sukkot and the solemn days of autumn. The "Probable" character of this chapter stems from the fact that the precise meaning the patrons attached to these images — eschatological hope, communal affirmation, simple funerary piety — partly eludes us, for lack of contemporary explanatory texts. The image confirms the centrality of the Temple in Jewish Memory; it does not, on its own, reveal the intention of each family.
Many of these bases bore, in addition to emblems, short inscriptions, sometimes in Latin, that connect Jewish production to the Roman artisanal koinè. The corpus is indeed not isolated: it belongs to an urban production shared by several communities. The British Museum collection, one of the most important in the world, illustrates this diversity: the British Museum project focuses on its collection of late antique gilded glasses, the second largest of its kind after that of the Vatican, comprising Christian, Jewish, pagan, and secular portrait medallion examples, as well as vessel bases, plaques, and medallions, originating primarily from the catacombs of Rome.
The funerary function is the best established of all. The glasses were placed on the walls of the catacombs and embedded in the limestone base. Far from mere ornaments, they served as markers within the subterranean labyrinth: among the countless funerary niches, it would have been difficult to discern who was buried and where; such gilded glasses, along with other objects, acted as signals. This dual value — aesthetic and practical — explains the care with which these discs were reused and set in the mortar of the loculi.
Jewish gold glasses can only be understood within the landscape of the Hebrew catacombs of the City — Monteverde, Vigna Randanini, Villa Torlonia in particular. These underground complexes, whose funerary furnishings concentrate the bulk of the testimonies, are dated by archaeological research to the same period as the glasses. The datable sarcophagi of the 3rd and 4th centuries, the gold glasses — when their original provenance is known with certainty — and the lamps all contribute to dating the construction of the complexes to the 3rd century and their full development to the following century.
The entanglement of Roman funerary cultures is apparent even in the details of objects. The Jewish and Christian communities drew from the same craftsmanship, which sometimes produces troubling hybridizations: in Rome, three lamps bearing the Christian monogram on their disc were found in the Jewish catacomb of Monteverde, and in the Christian catacomb of Commodilla, a lamp bearing a menorah on the disc. These interferences serve as a reminder that the confessional boundary, clear in its symbols, remained porous in the marketplace of objects and the workshops that produced them.
The modern history of gold glasses is almost as eventful as their ancient function was peaceful. Roman gold glasses decorated with pagan and Jewish subjects are precious datable materials from the 3rd and 4th centuries; their beauty and preciousness made them, from the earliest discoveries during explorations of the Roman catacombs in the 16th century, objects highly sought after by collectors and museums around the world. The great Vatican collections bear witness to this: the "gold glasses" of the Christian Museum come from the Chigi, Carpegna, Buonarroti, and Vettori collections of the 17th and 18th centuries, augmented by catacomb finds in the 19th century.
The fate of certain examples mirrors the dramas of the 20th century. A emblematic set, which had passed into a Polish aristocratic collection, was dispersed by the war: years later, the heirs of the Działyński family did everything in their power to recover the accumulated belongings, but the glasses had been lost; it was only in the 1960s that they were acquired for the nascent Musée d'Israël. The resolution of this dispute illustrates contemporary restitution practices: in 2008, following negotiations, the Museum decided to return them to their rightful owners, with two of them nonetheless remaining on display at the Jerusalem exhibition and one being returned to the descendants of the Działyński family. The trajectory of these objects — catacomb, cabinet of curiosities, château, Nazi looting, antiquities market, museum, restitution — encapsulates in itself the long posthumous life of Roman Jewish heritage.
The Jewish gilded glass of Rome condenses, within a disc of a few centimeters, several strata of history. An artisanal stratum: a refined Roman technique, shared across communities. A funerary stratum: a use as marker and ornament in the catacombs, where the reuse of cup bases ensured their preservation. A symbolic stratum: a repertoire — menorah, ark, lulav, shofar, etrog — which keeps alive, in diaspora, the Memory of the vanished Temple. A modern stratum, finally: a history of collections, lootings, and restitutions that extends to our own time the fragility of these witnesses.
If the materiality and function of these objects are solidly established by the catalogues of the Vatican and the British Museum and by the archaeology of the catacombs, the close interpretation of their iconography and the identity of their patrons retain a degree of uncertainty — hence the "Probable" status of this synthesis. These glasses remain, for the historian of diasporas, one of the most eloquent points of contact between Greco-Roman material culture and the affirmation of identity within ancient Judaism.
