# Medallion with a Portrait of Gennadios > Unknown Roman gold-glass engraver - 250-300 CE (Metropolitan Museum dating); Patt 2024 gives ca. 200-250 CE for the same object in her published figure caption > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/roman-gold-glass-engraver/gennadios-medallion-met/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-03 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Unknown Roman gold-glass engraver - **Date:** 250-300 CE (Metropolitan Museum dating); Patt 2024 gives ca. 200-250 CE for the same object in her published figure caption - **Medium:** Glass, gold leaf, polychromy - **Dimensions:** 4.1 x 0.6 cm (1 5/8 x 1/4 in.), a pierced pendant roundel, not a cut vessel-bottom fragment - **Object type:** Glass - **Period:** Roman, third century CE - **Current location:** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - **Attribution:** disputed ## Summary A gold-glass pendant portrait, 4.1 centimeters across, made somewhere in the Roman Empire in the second half of the third century CE and inscribed in Greek with the name of the young man it shows: Gennadios, called most accomplished in the musical arts. The Metropolitan Museum of Art bought it in 1926 through the Fletcher Fund from a French dealer, Martin Fabiani, with no earlier owner recorded anywhere in the sources consulted.Since Joseph Breck's 1927 study, the inscription has anchored a claim that this medallion, and a whole class of comparable third-century gold-glass portraits, was produced in Alexandria, Egypt, on the strength of word-endings read as Alexandrian Greek. Rachel Catherine Patt's 2024 article in the American Journal of Archaeology treats this medallion as one of only two inscribed examples the entire theory rests on, the other being a medallion set into the Cross of Desiderius in Brescia, and finds no genuine Alexandrian dialect feature in either text. She reads the endings instead as a documented nickname form of the later Roman Empire, unmoored from any single city.The pre-1926 ownership chain is not padded out here because it does not exist in the record: the Museum's own provenance field runs directly from an unrecorded maker to the French dealer who sold the piece in 1926. That gap is reported as a gap, not bridged with invention. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **250-300 CE** Unrecorded maker and first owner(s) `[unknown]` (origin) The medallion's place of manufacture is itself disputed (see attribution). No maker, workshop, or first owner is named or inferable from any source consulted. The subject, Gennadios, is known only from the inscription; he is not otherwise documented (see open questions). - **-1926** Unrecorded `[unknown]` (gap) The Metropolitan Museum's own published provenance field for this object contains a single line: '[Martin Fabiani (French)(sold 1926)]'. Nothing precedes it. No auction record, dealer stock number, exhibition, or earlier collection has been found in the sources consulted that would extend the chain further back. This is recorded as a genuine gap, not filled with speculation. - **-1926** Martin Fabiani (French dealer) `[documented]` (sale) The Metropolitan Museum's provenance field names Martin Fabiani, a French dealer, as the party who sold the medallion to the Museum in 1926; the bracketed format is the Museum's own convention for a dealer of record where fuller title history is not published. Whether this is the same Martin Fabiani (1899-1989) later prominent in the Paris art trade as Ambroise Vollard's associate and, after 1940, as a dealer active during the German occupation, cannot be confirmed from the sources consulted: the only detailed biography found makes no mention of antiquities dealing, of gold glass, or of this sale, and his documented career in that biography centers on paintings from the 1930s onward. The two may be the same person or two different men who happened to share a name; this record does not assert an identification that the sources do not support. - **1926-present** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York `[documented]` (purchase) Acquired in 1926 through the Fletcher Fund, the acquisitions endowment created from the 1917 bequest of the industrialist and collector Isaac Dudley Fletcher. The same fund later purchased Velazquez's Portrait of Juan de Pareja for the Museum. The medallion carries accession number 26.258 and Object ID 466645, and the Museum's Open Access API records it as public domain (isPublicDomain: true). ## Open questions - Who did Martin Fabiani acquire the medallion from, and when, before selling it to the Metropolitan Museum in 1926? No source consulted extends the chain earlier than the dealer's own name. - Is the Martin Fabiani who sold this medallion in 1926 the same Martin Fabiani (1899-1989) later prominent in the Paris art trade as Ambroise Vollard's associate and, after 1940, in occupation-era dealing? The detailed biography located for that dealer does not mention antiquities or this sale. - Was Gennadios a specific, otherwise identifiable individual, or purely a personal name attached to an anonymous private portrait? No third-century bearer of the name is documented in any source consulted; every other Gennadios on record is at least a century and a half later. - Which dating is correct for this object: the Metropolitan Museum's own 250-300 CE, or the ca. 200-250 CE given in Rachel Catherine Patt's own 2024 published caption for the same medallion? - Now that Patt's 2024 article appears in the Metropolitan Museum's own published bibliography for this object, will the Museum revise its structured Geography field, which as of 2026-09-03 still states 'Made in Alexandria, Egypt' without qualification? - Has any technical or conservation study specific to this exact medallion, such as gold-leaf composition analysis or glass compositional analysis, ever been carried out? None was located in the sources consulted, and if one exists in an unpublished Metropolitan Museum conservation file, it has not surfaced in the public literature. ## Sources - [1] Metropolitan Museum of Art, object page, 'Medallion with a Portrait of Gennadios,' accession 26.258, Object ID 466645, consulted for the overview text, Geography field, Signatures/Inscriptions/Markings tab, Provenance tab, Exhibition History tab, and References/bibliography tab. - [2] Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection API, object record for Object ID 466645 (structured data: classification, department, credit line, isPublicDomain, primaryImage, additionalImages). - [3] Patt, Rachel Catherine. '"Probably Alexandria": Gold-Glass Portraiture and the Allure of Egypt.' American Journal of Archaeology 128, no. 2 (April 2024): 221-242. DOI: 10.1086/728800. Abstract and figure 1 caption (dating this object ca. 200-250 CE) consulted via the journal's own article page. - [4] Metropolitan Museum of Art, object page, 'Gold Glass Medallion with a Mother and Child,' accession 17.190.109a, Object ID 463989, consulted only to verify this is a separate, uninscribed object and to confirm its distinguishing facts for the version-safety section. - [5] Wikipedia, 'List of gold glass portraits,' consulted for general corpus function (commemorative gifts) and Brescia medallion details. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with a specialist gold-glass catalogue such as Howells 2015. - [6] Wikipedia, 'Gold glass,' consulted for the general gold sandwich-glass manufacturing technique, catacomb vessel-bottom findspots, and the traditional Alexandria production hypothesis as background. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with a specialist technical study. - [7] Wikidata, item Q29385435, 'Medallion with a Portrait of Gennadios,' consulted for structured classification (instance of: pendant) and depicted concepts. - [8] Wikipedia, 'Isaac Dudley Fletcher,' consulted for the biography of the Fletcher Fund's founder and confirmation that the same fund later purchased Velazquez's Portrait of Juan de Pareja. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with the Metropolitan Museum's own 1918 bulletin describing the Fletcher bequest. - [9] Wikimedia Commons, Category:Medallion with a Portrait of Gennadios, MET 26.258, and the Commons API imageinfo/extmetadata for the files therein, consulted to confirm CC0 licensing on Metropolitan Museum-donated files. - [10] Wikipedia, 'Gennadios' (disambiguation), consulted to confirm no third-century individual of this name is documented anywhere in the historical record. Tertiary source. - [11] Wikipedia (French), 'Martin Fabiani,' consulted for the biography of the French art dealer of that name active from the 1920s onward, to assess (inconclusively) whether he is the same Martin Fabiani named in this object's Metropolitan Museum provenance record. Tertiary source. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.