Gold sheet ornaments
Gold sheet ornaments
This group of fine ornaments fashioned from gold sheet with impressed representations of warriors comes from graves of the Geometric period on the island of Skyros. Made exclusively for funerary use, the ornaments include a diadem with central projection, a band and two plaques with holes for sewing onto the garment (appliqués), and two strips of uncertain use in the shape of an inverted Y. Although typologically these pieces do not belong to the same chronological horizon, their creation is nevertheless placed between the first half of the 9th and the mid-8th c. BC. Common trait of their decoration is the representation of helmeted warriors, most of whom hold the distinctive Geometric shield of the so-called ‘Dipylon type’ and in one case spears. The diadem and the plaques were probably embossed in a matrix intended for larger objects, because the curved meanders surrounding the warrior figures are cut off abruptly. Gold-sheet ornaments, particularly diadems, were quite common in the Aegean already from the Protogeometric period, but the first pictorial representations appeared in the mid-9th c. BC. The illustrated examples suggest affinities with Euboean workshops (Lefkandi, Eretria), although their iconography is at present unique and can be paralleled only with images on Attic vases of the Late Geometric period (760-700 BC). There is little leeway for doubt n their interpretation; in a society in which warfare was still the privilege of nobility, jewellery of this kind must have accompanied dead warriors of aristocratic lineages.
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Ancient Greek Art