Button (500s): Art, History and Details

Button (500s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The decorative technique known as granulation had been used in Etruscan, Greek, and Roman jewelry well before this Byzantine piece was made. Granulation is when tiny spheres or “granules” are attached to a piece. It can be seen here in in a rock crystal button decorated with a six-pointed star, with a simply set garnet in the center.

Object facts

• Title: Button
• Date: 500s
• Culture: Byzantium, early Byzantine period, 6th century
• Type: Jewelry
• Technique: rock crystal with a garnet mounted in a gold granulated star
• Dimensions: Diameter: 3.1 cm (1 1/4 in.)
• Collection: MED - Byzantine
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1946.259

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. Horace Kelley

Further reading listed by the museum

• Milliken, William M. “Byzantine Jewelry and Associated Pieces.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 34, no. 7 (1947).
• Walters Art Gallery (Baltimore, Md.), and Dorothy Eugenia Miner. Early Christian and Byzantine Art, An Exhibition Held at the Baltimore Museum of Art, April 25-June 22 [1947]. Baltimore: Trustees of the Walters Art Gallery, 1947.
• Gertsman, Elina and Barbara H. Rosenwein. The Middle Ages in 50 Objects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

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.