Bird-shaped Bottle

This hand-blown vessel in the shape of a bird was a container for toiletry essences. It’s almost intact condition suggests that it must be a grave find. Bird bottles mostly originate from women’s graves. Unfortunately, in this case neither the place of discovery nor other grave goods from the same grave are known, which could provide clues as to the social position of the deceased or the time period.

The dating of such glasses torn out of context is based on parallels from datable finds. Glass bottles in the shape of birds occur at various places in the Roman Empire. Very similar birds were produced in the Roman city of Aventicum (Avenches) in the 1st century.

Like the other objects in the display case on the right, this piece also comes from the illegally excavated collection of Luigi Palma di Cesnola (1832-1904), who was first a professional military officer, then a diplomat and amateur archaeologist, and from 1879 the first director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. These glasses were purchased at an auction in Paris in 1873 by Friedrich Imhoof-Blumer, the great Swiss numismatist, and were later bequeathed to the Münzkabinett Winterthur.

As with most of the antique objects in the extensive collection of Cesnola, which mainly went to the Metropolitan Museum, we know neither the exact excavation site of the pieces nor the context in which they were found. In tearing apart the finds from a site, important information for dating the graves, the gender of the deceased, but also about their social position, their habits, their access to imported goods and their ideas about the afterlife are lost to scholarship.