In 1760, Johann Joachim Winckelmann wrote that the entire history of ancient art could be written exclusively through the study of engraved gemstones, so clearly did they represent the evolving styles and iconographies of different periods. More recently, as François Lissarrague, Judy Barringer, and others have noted, vase painting has become a primary vehicle for the study of image production and image reception in the Greek world. Yet large-scale sculpture in stone, coins, and other media also have much to offer the so-called ‘visual turn,’ and this chapter aims to address some of the last, which tend to be accorded less attention, not just because they are perceived to survive less well than more durable ceramics and marbles, but also because of diverse historiographic biases. Gold and silver work, too, whether stamped, chased, or engraved – a series of techniques which the ancients praised highly as toreutike – display a stylistic development similar to that in other media, as do skillfully carved ivories. Since the Renaissance, however, art historians have privileged the Vasarian triad of Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting anachronistically over works in other media that were highly valued by ancient patrons, viewers, artists, and writers alike.

Objects fashioned of gold, silver, ivory, and other precious substances are often depicted in more durable media, whether it be a group of satyrs assembling an ivory kline on an Attic red-figure kalpis; Thyrsites lying dead amid splendid metalwork on an Apulian amphora (Fig. 18.1); or a child standing before a sideboard laden with finely wrought vessels in a Hellenistic terracotta (Fig. 18.2). Indeed, fine jewelry occupies the focal point of some of the discipline's most canonical works, such as the grave stele of Hegeso (Fig. 18.3), in which the daughter of Proxenos admires a once painted necklace, although we may have to work a bit harder to see it.

Like Caesar's Gaul, this chapter addressing “the iconography of the precious” is divided into three parts. First, it presents some examples of iconography in precious materials and explores how the objects that bore them and the images themselves functioned like and unlike similar objects and images in other media.