Beaker with Scale Pattern (1–100 CE): Art, History and Details

Beaker with Scale Pattern (1–100 CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The dark brown glaze on the exterior of this beaker is patchy and irregular, allowing the light red clay beneath to show through. The glaze is especially light on the ridges of the raised scales that decorate the upper body of the vessel, arranged in four offset rows. The pattern was created by applying thick clay slip to the surface of the beaker after it was removed from the potter’s wheel.

Object facts

• Title: Beaker with Scale Pattern
• Date: 1–100 CE
• Culture: Rhenish (Cologne), Gallo-Roman, 1st Century
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: reddish ware with dark gray burnished slip
• Dimensions: Diameter: 10.2 cm (4 in.); Overall: 11.2 cm (4 7/16 in.)
• Collection: GR - Roman
• Department: Greek and Roman Art
• Accession number: 1992.183

A detail from the museum

Several textile fibers were found inside this beaker, suggesting that it may have contained an object or objects wrapped in cloth when it was buried.

Collection credit

Seventy-fifth anniversary gift of Rainer Zietz

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. "The Year in Review for 1992." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 80, no. 2 (1993): 38-79.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.