The Matterozzi Collection of Early Christian gold-glass at the British Museum: An investigation of textual records and an edition of archival sources

This article recounts the story of an outstanding and yet little-known eighteenth-century character, the collector of sacred art Alessandro Matterozzi (1713–1783). He displayed in his family palace in Urbania (Marche, Italy), among paintings and antiquities, a select collection of Early Christian gold-glass, a form of decorative glass made of two layers of glass with a design in gold leaf fused between them. The seventeen pieces acquired from his collection by the British Museum consist of the bases of glass vessels found mainly in Early Christian catacombs. The drawings filed in Gaetano Marini’s sylloge entitled ‘Inscriptiones christianae’ (1765–1801), now in the Vatican Library, together with other newly studied written sources, document how Matterozzi assembled one of the largest gold-glass collections of his time, which was later added to the collections of the British Museum.