Lamp (late 300s CE): Art, History and Details

Lamp (late 300s CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Numerous oil lamps of various shapes and sizes have survived from the late Roman and early Byzantine periods. Most served a basic utilitarian function and were plainly fashioned from clay or bronze. However, a few more elaborate examples, such as this one, have survived in silver. Embellished with an elegant horse-head handle, this lamp was made to fit on the nearby stand, thus offering its owner flexibility of function.

Object facts

• Title: Lamp
• Date: late 300s CE
• Culture: Byzantium, Syria(?), Byzantine period
• Type: Metalwork
• Technique: silver
• Dimensions: Overall: 9.2 x 16 x 7 cm (3 5/8 x 6 5/16 x 2 3/4 in.)
• Collection: MED - Byzantine
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1954.597.a

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.
• Milliken, William. "Early Byzantine Silver." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 45, no. 3 (March 1958): 35-40.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.

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.