The Getty Villa

Recently re-opened after an extensive renovation and expansion, The Getty Villa provides an excellent backdrop for the display of its Etruscan, Roman and Greek antiquities, all from cultures of the Mediterranean world. Located in Malibu, California, the museum is situated within a Roman villa modeled after a country house that was buried at Herculaneum after the A.D. 79 eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. A smaller, inner peristyle in the villa brings natural light into the building while a formal garden or outer peristyle, centered around a long pool, fronts the imposing building.

Jewelry and small objects constitute a minor part of this institutions’s collections, although it does have one of the largest number of agate ornaments on display, some eighteen or so beads in four groups. All with a Parthian attribution, dating from the second to first centuries B.C., these are almost all agate cylindrical beads or leech beads, with none in carnelian, also commonly used for beads. They are unusual in that all are capped with looped sheet gold ends and often have a center gold band, frequently also looped and less often with bezel-set gems. Many of the gold caps or center bands have surface decoration, usually granulation, rarely filigree. While gold capped beads are well-known in antiquity, it is rare to see so many in this intact condition, and almost all with loops.

Leech beads are known from Ur, dating to 2200 B.C., and were wide-spread in the Middle and Near East; other related types have been found in Zhou Dynasty China and leech bead derivatives may be found as recently as in Iron Age Thailand (Liu 1999). These hardstone items of Parthian attribution at The Getty Villa are luxury goods that have a long tradition. Recently, I had the rare opportunity to view a portion of the Nimrud treasures (approximately 800 B.C.) of the Iraq National Museum and was struck by the predominance of banded agate eye cabochons, spherical beads and inlays, as well as blue chalcedony drop pendants, that were either bezel-set or strung with the gold jewelry of this hoard (Powerpoint: The secret of Nimrud, Part 2, The show of the treasures, photographed by Noreen Feeney). The leech-shaped and other agate beads are most likely of the Indian sub-continent, as its lapidary industries supplied much of the ancient world and continues to currently. This stone industry worked other hardstones, such as rock crystal, also seen as perforated ornaments, as in the two strands shown here.

The Parthian agate wine cup demonstrates the use of hardstones for making prestige vessels. One finds throughout the ancient world vessel forms in hardstones, such as agate, rock crystal or diorite, in Greek or Roman contexts, also earlier at Nimrud or very commonly in predynastic Egypt (Liu 2004). Often they are displayed with their imitations or transformations in metal, ceramic or glass. This argues against the misconception that the imitation in glass was the actual prestige item, although glass was certainly valued in many cultures (Liu 2005).

For those interested in other jewelry, there is a long strand of glass Roman mosaic face beads and a glass Phoenician mask pendant in an unusual gold mount. There are several strands of gold beads with amphora-shaped amber beads, cases of carved gems, representations of birds in either bronze and glass, carved bone or fabricated gold, some similar to Etruscan faience bird beads. In gallery 206, there is a pair of Egyptian earrings dating A.D. 300-400, of feather, glass beads, coral, and cloth. While
not jewelry, the two Gallo-Roman bronze vessels are similar to pendants and brooches of the period that also use enamels to bring color to metals.

Shown in the context of a Roman villa and related cultural objects, a visit to this museum is as much about savoring the ambience of the Roman world as seeing artifacts in which one has interests.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank the J. Paul Getty Trust for permission to reproduce their images and one taken by the author. I thank Sylvia Kennedy and Martha Bundy for forwarding the fascinating Powerpoint presentation on The Nimrud Treasures; it is not very often that one sees an audience at a museum preview accompanied by assault rifle-armed bodyguards. I thank Bassem Elias for the impromptu invitation to The Getty Villa.

REFERENCES
Liu, R .K. 1999 Leech beads. Ornament 22 (4): 8-10.
—2004 Cleveland Museum of Art. Ornament 28 (2): 36-37.
—2005 Toledo Museum of Art. Glass study collection. Ornament 28 (4): 75, 77.