Portland Vase

The Portland Vase is a Roman cameo glass vessel about twenty-five centimetres tall, made between roughly AD 1 and AD 25, formed from deep violet-blue glass overlaid with a layer of white glass that was then carved away to leave a design of seven human figures, a large serpent and two bearded, horned heads in white relief, depicting scenes whose precise meaning remains debated. It was made by the dip-overlay technique, in which molten white glass was fused onto a blue glass body and blown together before the surface was carved down like a cameo, and it survives as the best known example of this exacting Roman glassmaking process. First recorded in a Roman collection around 1600, it passed through the Barberini family and Sir William Hamilton before the Duchess of Portland acquired it in 1784, giving the vase its name, and the British Museum has held it since 1810, purchasing it outright in 1945.