Iranians and Greeks in South Russia - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian ...

THE SARMATIANS 133
the field. The technical processes employed are embossing, and
ornamentation by means of gold wires and granulation : as I said
above, true granulation begins to die out, and is replaced by pseudogranulation,
a variant of the gold wire technique. But the decoration
is entirely subordinated to the colouring. The artist's chief object is
to vary the coloration by inserting precious stones wherever he can ;
by filling with stones the spaces which the geometric or floral decoration
leaves free. There was a great demand for vases cut out of
blocks of solid glass, in imitation of
stone and metal vases. But the
elegant shape of the vase did not
satisfy the inhabitants of the Kuban
valley in the Roman period : they
required a casing of gold enriched
with stones and enamels (fig. 16,
1,2). The gold diadem or bracelet
must present a combination of gold
and of precious stones : a fibula or
a belt clasp must be gay with inset
coloured glass and gems (fig. 16, 4
—
Alexandrian coloured glass in the
centre— , and fig. 19,0—transparent
white glass) . I shall speak presently
of the openwork plaques with
coloured filling. I would also mention
a vase found in the Caucasus :
the vase itself is of coloured glass,
the openwork casing of silver.
It is interesting to notice the
revival of the polychrome style,
rejected by Greek art but popular
throughout the East. Greek art
BROOCHES OF THE
5ARA\AT1AN GRAVES
Fig. 19.
furnishes no parallels to this rude and vivid polychromy : in the
East, however, the tradition flourished without interruption. The
Kuban polychromy is very closely akin to the Persian goldsmith's
work which is represented by the Oxus treasure in the British Museum
and by the finds from Susa in the Louvre. The processes, the
principles, the shapes are the same, but the Kuban work is ruder and
more primitive.
The goldsmiths who worked for the Kuban valley revived a form
of polychrome toreutic which became highly developed in the
Western Europe of later times : openwork objects, the voids of which