• Material : Cornelian Shell, 9 k Gold marked.
• Size: 2 2/8" by just over 1 6/8"
• Date and Origin: Circa 1850/1860 Italy, frame is English.
• Conditions: More than excellent.

Excellent Quality Cameo depicting Dionysus as a baby with the Nymphs of Nysa. The legend goes that Zeus gave the infant Dionysus into the charge of .the rain-nymphs of Nysa, who nourished his infancy and childhood, and for their care Zeus rewarded them by placing them as the Hyades among the stars.  In Greek mythology, the mountainous district of Nysa, variously associated with Ethiopia, Libya, Tribalia or Arabia by Greek mythographers, was the traditional place where the rain nymphs, the Hyades, raised the infant Dionysus, the "god of Nysa". The name "Nysa" may even be an invention to explain the god's name. This is a very rare subject in a cameo. Rarest cameo and subject very desirable collectors' piece.

A bit of history:

Bacchus (Dionysus for the Greeks) was the God of Wine, of the joyful voluptuousness of drinking and of the sensuality to which the Italics attributed at the end the uses and the rites of the corresponding Greek God Dionysus. He's the God of the vices, his cult (Bacchanalian) arrived in the Italian Peninsula in the 2nd century B.C. The symbol of this divinity, other than the grapevine and the climbing ivy, was the thyrsus, a stick surmounted  by an ivy tangle. On a side his aspect was always the one of a very handsome youth with a curly head and crowned by vine-leaf  and grapevines. He was a jolly, smiling God and symbol of the rejoicing and of the richness of the nature, on the other side tied up to dark rites and sometime wild. Son of Zeus and Semele, a mortal woman, that following the perfidious counsel of the jealous Hera, was burnt down for having looked at the face of her lover, Zeus, in all of his splendour, thing not permitted to the mortals. During the Dionysian festivals usually was sacrificed a goat with a chorals and speeches exchanged between the priests. To this aspect of that ritual the Greek Tragedy can be originated as the Greek thinkers believe, Tragedy destined, in the Classic Greece, to become one of the highest and most complete form of poetry.