Transparent blue glass; blown, blobbed, marvered. Pyriform body; rim folded down, over and in; neck splays and merges imperceptibly with body; hollow concave base; two applied handles with crimped extensions at bottom. Body and handles decorated with opaque white, yellow and red blobs, marvered in, and in many cases disfigured by bubbles which have burst.

One early method of decorating blown vessels was by applying random fragments of colored glass to produce a speckled effect. This was achieved by reheating the partly formed vessel and either rolling it in loose fragments or dropping the fragments onto it. The glassmaker could then reheat it and roll it on a marver (in Roman times, probably a stone slab) until the fragments were flush. Further inflation would enlarge and distort the flattened fragments, giving the glass a multicolored appearance. This may have been an inexpensive means of imitating costly mosaic glass. Glass with a speckled surface seems to have been a specialty of northern Italian glasshouses in the first century A.D. The jar shown here was decorated by gathering molten glass on the blowpipe, rolling it in chips of colored glass, and blowing the glass to the desired size and shape.