• Material : Cornelian  Shell, 9k gold marked.
• Size: 3" by 2 1/2".
• Date and Origin: Circa 1880 Italy. Scratch signed on the back with artist name "Fioppi", a well known cameo carver of the 1800's in Rome.
• Conditions: A very few slighest natural shell lines, only visible when cameo is backlit, not visible looking at the cameo from the front. Brooch and pendant.

Large, fine Museum Quality shell cameo in a nine carat gold reeded brooch/pendant mount, circa 1880. The cameo is carved in three strata and depicts Bacchus, the God of Wine, after the antique. His hair and animal pelt are bedecked with fruiting vines and he bears a thyrsus. His head crowned with a wreath of fruiting vines, wearing a pelt and carrying a thyrsus. Inspired by libations he looks upward in ecstasy. Look how the carver used the different colors of the shell to evidence the leaves, the pelt. I have never seen a Dionysus like this one. The amazing colors of the shell make this cameo unique, there are also shadows of pink, you can see them lookong at the goat pelt and at the top of Bacchus' thyrsus. Never seen something of similar. You must look at the pelt he's wearing, you can see the perfect carving that gives you just the idea of a real pelt!  Bacchus (Dionysus for the Greek Mythology) is here portrayed as a very handsome young man, his eyes are very expressive, his straight nose is just a perfect Greek one. He wears a ribbon on his hair and his hair is braided and form like a bow behind his head. The carving on this cameo is three dimensional, the vine leaves on his head and especially the ones on his shoulders and the animal head, they are so relieved that you seem can pick them up. From all these details you can understand what I mean when I say that this one is a Museum Quality cameo! This one is with no doubt the most wonderful Dionysus I have ever handled.  This is an incredible work of art, very detailed cameo, carved by an artist.  Rarest cameo 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. Zeus, to save Dionysus, took to the end the pregnancy of his sons sewing him in a thigh of his then he brought him to Nysa where the Nymphs fed him with honey (the wet nurses Nymphs became later the stars of the Ladi constellation). 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.