# Brescia Medallion > Unknown Roman gold-glass workshop, location disputed between Rome and Alexandria - c. 200-300 CE (portrait medallion); set into the Cross of Desiderius by the 9th century CE > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/roman-gold-glass-workshop/brescia-medallion-cross-of-desiderius/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-03 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Unknown Roman gold-glass workshop, location disputed between Rome and Alexandria - **Date:** c. 200-300 CE (portrait medallion); set into the Cross of Desiderius by the 9th century CE - **Medium:** Gold leaf fused between two layers of blown glass, engraved and detailed with painted pigment; mounted within a gold, wood-cored, gem-set processional cross - **Dimensions:** Medallion approximately 6 cm in diameter as an independent object; overall dimensions of the Cross of Desiderius are not established in the sources consulted - **Object type:** Glass - **Period:** Roman Imperial (medallion); Lombard-Carolingian (the cross into which it is set) - **Current location:** Museo di Santa Giulia, Brescia, Italy. Displayed in place within the Cross of Desiderius, in the Romanesque oratory of Santa Maria in Solario, part of the former monastic complex of San Salvatore-Santa Giulia. - **Attribution:** disputed ## Summary A Roman gold-glass portrait roundel of about 200-300 CE, showing three unidentified figures, fixed since the early medieval period into the face of the Cross of Desiderius, a gem-studded gold processional cross in the Museo di Santa Giulia, Brescia. Eighteenth-century antiquarians proposed it showed the empress Galla Placidia with her children; that identification stood as the standard museum label for well over a century before Joseph Breck rejected it in print in 1927.A second theory then took its place: that the medallion, one of only two inscribed gold-glass portraits known, was made in Alexandria, argued from a supposed Alexandrian dialect feature in its Greek inscription and repeated as recently as 2007. Rachel Catherine Patt's 2024 article in the American Journal of Archaeology dismantles that argument in turn, re-reading the same letters as a common later-Roman-Imperial nickname form rather than dialect evidence.What remains, after two rejected identifications forty years short of a century apart, is an anonymous Roman family portrait of real technical accomplishment, its sitters, its workshop and the exact date of its arrival on a Lombard king's cross all still genuinely unresolved. ## 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. - **c. 200-300 CE** Unknown patron or family `[documented]` (origin) The medallion itself is the evidence for its own manufacture: a gold-glass portrait roundel of a type securely dated by comparison with the wider corpus, principally the Gennadios medallion, to the 3rd century CE. The identity of the patron, sitters and workshop is not documented. - **c. 300 CE-by the early 18th century** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) No findspot, excavation record, or owner is documented for the medallion between its manufacture and its incorporation into the Cross of Desiderius. The date of that incorporation is itself unresolved: the cross's own goldsmith's work is dated to the 9th century CE by the Fondazione Brescia Musei, after King Desiderius's reign ended in 774, despite the cross's traditional association with his personal gift to the monastery he founded. - **8th-9th century CE (traditional attribution to Desiderius) / 9th century CE (goldsmith's dating)-modern period** Monastery of San Salvatore-Santa Giulia, Brescia `[documented]` (incorporation and custody) The cross, with the medallion set into it, is documented in monastic and civic custody in Brescia; the monastery itself was founded in 753 by Desiderius and his wife Ansa, who is recorded on a now-lost tomb inscription in the church's southern wall, seen as late as the 17th century, naming her queen and wife of King Desiderius. The cross's later display location, the Romanesque oratory of Santa Maria in Solario, was decorated with frescoes by Floriano Ferramola between 1513 and 1524, indicating continuous custody within the same religious complex across the medieval and early modern periods. - **c. 1725 (recalled 1762)-1858** Civic and ecclesiastical antiquarian custody, Brescia `[documented]` (documentation) Francesco Antonio Zaccaria recalled in a work published in 1762 having seen the medallion around 1725, the earliest specific sighting located for this record. By 1858 the medallion was known to Raffaele Garrucci, who published a drawing of it in his study of gilded glass from the Roman catacombs despite doubts, shared with Hermann Vopel, about its authenticity. - **1858-1927** Museo Civico Cristiano / Musei Civici, Brescia `[documented]` (attribution as Galla Placidia (standard museum label)) The medallion was displayed and catalogued under the identification of Galla Placidia and her children, Valentinian III and Justa Grata Honoria, an identification current since the 18th century, until it was formally challenged in print by Breck in 1927. - **1927-2024** Museo di Santa Giulia (from 1998), Brescia `[documented]` (reattribution disputes) The imperial identification was rejected following Breck's 1927 study. A subsequent theory, current from the 1920s and restated by Elsner in 2007, proposed an Alexandrian workshop on linguistic grounds; the monastic complex housing the cross became the Museo di Santa Giulia, part of the Fondazione Brescia Musei, in 1998. - **2024-present** Museo di Santa Giulia, Brescia (Fondazione Brescia Musei) `[documented]` (current custody and standing scholarly dispute) The medallion remains on display in situ within the Cross of Desiderius. Patt's 2024 American Journal of Archaeology article directly challenges the Alexandrian-workshop theory, leaving both the sitters' identity and the workshop's location unresolved in current scholarship. ## Open questions - Who are the three people actually shown on the medallion? Both the imperial identification (Galla Placidia and her children) and the confident location of the workshop in Alexandria have been rejected in the peer-reviewed literature; no accepted alternative identity has replaced either. - Where was the medallion made? Patt (2024) removes the philological basis for an Alexandrian attribution but does not establish an alternative workshop location; Rome and other Greek-speaking centres of the later Roman Empire remain possible and unresolved. - What do the two inscribed words, BOUNNERI and KERAMI, actually mean or name? No confirmed translation is settled among the sources consulted, whether as personal names, nicknames, or something else. - Who first specifically proposed the Galla Placidia identification, and on what stated grounds? An eighteenth-century antiquarian tradition and Zaccaria's 1762 account of seeing the piece around 1725 establish the identification's currency by the mid-eighteenth century, but no single named originator or a stated rationale beyond costume and pose has been located for this record. - When, precisely, was the gold-glass medallion incorporated into the Cross of Desiderius, and by whom? The cross's goldsmith's work is dated by the Fondazione Brescia Musei to the 9th century CE, after the end of Desiderius's own reign in 774, while the cross is traditionally said to have been his gift to the monastery; how that traditional attribution relates to the object's actual ninth-century date is not resolved in the sources consulted. - Where was the medallion, physically, between its third-century manufacture and its documented presence on the cross by the early modern period? No excavation record, findspot, or intermediate owner is documented for this gap of several centuries. ## Sources - [1] Patt, Rachel Catherine. "'Probably Alexandria': Gold-Glass Portraiture and the Allure of Egypt." American Journal of Archaeology 128, no. 2 (April 2024). - [2] American Journal of Archaeology / University of Chicago Press, journal record for Patt (2024), DOI 10.1086/728800. - [3] Academia.edu, preprint/summary listing for Patt (2024), consulted where the publisher page could not be fetched in full. - [4] Breck, Joseph. "The Ficoroni Medallion and Some Other Gilded Glasses in the Metropolitan Museum of Art." The Art Bulletin 9, no. 4 (June 1927): 352-356. - [5] Elsner, Jas. Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. - [6] Wikipedia, "Cross of Desiderius." Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with the Fondazione Brescia Musei's own catalogue entry and published conservation literature. - [7] Wikipedia, "List of gold glass portraits." Tertiary source, consulted for the comparative corpus of gold-glass portrait medallions and their dimensions. - [8] Wikipedia, "Gold glass." Tertiary source, consulted for the manufacturing technique. - [9] Wikimedia Commons, "Category:Gold glass wrongly thought to be Galla Placidia," consulted for file captions documenting the rejected identification and the Elsner Alexandria theory. - [10] Wikimedia Commons API, extended metadata for File:Brescia medallion.png, used to verify public-domain licensing. - [11] Wikimedia Commons API, extended metadata for File:Brescia medallion (Garrucci).jpg, crediting Raffaele Garrucci, Vetri ornati di figure in oro trovati nei cimiteri dei cristiani primitivi di Roma (Rome, 1858). - [12] Wikimedia Commons API, extended metadata for File:Effigies ignotae (saec. IV, Brescia, Musei Civici).jpg. - [13] Wikimedia Commons API, extended metadata for File:Croce di Desiderio (Santa Giulia, Brescia) fronte.JPG, crediting photographer PrincipeRoby, CC BY-SA 4.0. - [14] Fondazione Brescia Musei, "Santa Giulia Museum." - [15] Wikipedia, "San Salvatore, Brescia." Tertiary source, consulted for the monastery's founding by Desiderius and Ansa. - [16] Wikipedia, "Ansa, Queen of the Lombards." 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.