With a smattering of exceptions, the names of ancient artists are largely lost to us and likely most toiled in relative obscurity in their own times. Particularly so, the producers of ‘minor’ arts…which brings me to this lovely blue cup.
Because the cup bears an inscription, “Ennion made me”, within a prominently placed tabula ansata beneath the rim and flanked by undulating ivy sprigs. In the ecosystem of glass production in the first decades of the 1st millennium A.D., Ennion is one of the very few known associated names. And based on find spots (and a variety of other criteria) of his fifty or so surviving works, he is thought to be a man (not short on ego), hailing from Sidon, a city in the Levant famous in Antiquity for its glass production. And he seems to be somewhat of a pioneer…
Thanks to new technologies, glass by the 1st century A.D. had become increasingly more affordable, and (as a commodity and technology) was a hugely successful export from the Eastern Mediterranean west towards metropolitan Rome. Glass blown into moulds (such as this cup), was a new technique. Although luxurious still, it was a reasonably cost-effective way to produce (at scale) vessels with fancy surfaces for light to dance across, mimicking cut glass and carved hard stone.
Whether Ennion was a leading craftsman or perhaps workshop owner, it seems he specialised in this new technology, and was responsible for a fashionable class of wares that was a recognised commodity across the Roman Empire. This cup, like so many signed by the master, was found in Northern Italy – a testament to how objects travelled in the ancient world.
Ennion was a name unknown in the modern period (apart from a rarefied community of ancient glass specialists) until twenty-two of his surviving works were the subject of a (very) posthumous solo show at the Met in 2015, a jewel-like exhibition in a delightfully anachronistic mode that paid tribute to this enigmatic character.
