Cameo Glass

カメオ・グラス / Roman era– / Technique / Vessel and Craft Techniques

Cased glass built from two or more layers in contrasting colours, where the outer layer is carved, cut or engraved away so the design stands out from the ground. Getty classifies it as a material rather than a period style. The image is not painted but left behind, and the thickness left standing is what decides how opaque it reads.

A pale image standing up in relief over a darker ground / Where the cut runs deep the ground colour shows through and the image sinks; only the thickest passages go fully opaque / The ground is one even colour and all the tonal range sits in the image / Edges are steps rather than drawn lines, so raking light throws a shadow off the image itself

Cameo Glass — Cup with Bacchus and Ariadne, Rome, c. 25 BC–AD 25, Getty Villa — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0 — Cup with Bacchus and Ariadne, Rome, c. 25 BC–AD 25, Getty Villa — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0 ／ Thomas Webb & Sons, cameo glass vase — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 ／ D'Argental, cameo glass vase — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Cameo Glass — Thomas Webb & Sons, cameo glass vase — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 — Cup with Bacchus and Ariadne, Rome, c. 25 BC–AD 25, Getty Villa — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0 ／ Thomas Webb & Sons, cameo glass vase — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 ／ D'Argental, cameo glass vase — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Dictionary entry

Best used for: Building an image out of two stacked surfaces, where the edge is carried by a step and its shadow instead of a drawn line · Working in blind emboss or foil, where nothing is added in colour and the whole image has to come from difference in thickness
Type: Cut the lettering out of the same layer as the image. Let the stroke width be a carving width, and avoid hairline faces.
Composition: A wide field of one dark colour with a single pale image on it. Keep the ground plain and put nothing between the two.
Material: Layers of contrasting glass with the outer one cut away. The thickness you leave standing gives the range from translucent to fully opaque.
Caution: Copying only the light and dark contrast as two flat fills loses the translucent middle that depth of cut produces, and the result reads as cut paper.
Further study: looking at a cross section of cased glass and counting how many layers of outer casing and ground are stacked / comparing thinly cut areas and thickly left areas within one image, and observing where the transmitted colour switches / following what techniques the Getty lists under cased glass, and confirming how cameo glass differs

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