Italian, circa 1800

Discovered in Ephesus shortly before 1787, the famous Cameo Zulian (as it was later known) was acquired in Smyrna by Luca Cortazzi, and gifted to Girolamo Zulian, Venetian representative in Constantinople, who in turn left it to the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Venice, where it remains to this day. Zulian had approached the antiquarian Enio Visconti who published the gem with an engraved illustration in 1793, and ten years later the cameo was further published in Richard Dagley's Gems: Selected from the Antique, London, 1804. Subsequently a number of copies in hardstone and glass were produced. The present example is a particularly fine one and may have been engraved by one of the leading gem cutters of the period, possibly Niccolò Morelli (1771-1838) or Giuseppe Girometti (1780-1851).

RELATED LITERATURE

P. Malgouyres, Pierres gravées: Camées, intailles et bagues de la collection Guy Ladrière, Paris, 2022, p. 99-100