Emperor Hadrian as world ruler

This sardonyx cameo was a presentation piece acquired by King Frederick I (1657–1713) in 1713, shortly before his death. It had already been published in 1679 with a copper engraving by the artist and art historian Joachim von Sandrart (1606–1688). A setting of gilded silver sheet tightly frames the cameo – the largest in the Berlin collection – and lends support to the multiply broken and reglued stone. On the front, the setting is smooth and ridged along the edge. The metal plate on the back is decorated with an oval surrounded by a network of vegetal arabesque cut-outs and plastically-moulded leaves and flowers. A triple row of tiny overlapping leaves encircles the whole. Two loops attached at the top and bottom of the frame, not quite centred, would have allowed it to be securely mounted. Comparanda among engravings and other settings for large cameos date this frame to the early seventeenth century.
The cameo depicts the Roman emperor Hadrian (r. AD 117–138) as world ruler. He stands frontally in a chariot drawn into the sky by two eagles, the emblems of Jupiter. He is being crowned by Oikoumene, the personification of the inhabited world. Wearing a cuirass, belt, general’s cloak, and laurel wreath, the emperor is represented as the guarantor of the empire by the long sceptre (partially lost) in his right hand and by the palladion, a small statuette of the goddess Athena, in his left. Hadrian wears a short beard and tightly curled hair across his forehead. He looks at Oikumene standing next to him. Upon her head is a tall mural crown from which a veil falls over her neck and shoulders. She wears a sleeveless belted chiton as well as a mantle slung around her hips and draped over her left arm. In her left hand she grasps a sceptre (the upper part is lost) and with her right she holds a large laurel wreath above the emperor’s head, fixing him with her gaze.
Although the pair of figures occupies only the upper third of the oval composition, they are accentuated by the lighter layers of stone that also run through the top of the chariot and the two eagles’ heads turned toward the emperor. The majestic birds float with their inside wings spread across the front of the chariot and their outside wings folded against their bodies. Each carries a laurel wreath in the talons of one foot and a sheaf of grain in the other. Together they lift the ruler from the mortal world into the heavenly realm of Jupiter.
The relief, fairly shallow in relation to its surface area, follows the irregular structure of the four agate layers. While the somewhat sketchy engraving was achieved mainly with a flat-wheel tool, the portrait head of the emperor is quite different: it was later reworked, making it even smaller (2.2 by 2.8 mm) but nonetheless fully modelled. The background around it was smoothed but not polished. The reworked head is distinguished by finer engraving with a small pellet tool. Hadrian’s face, beard, and hairstyle were carved into the original portrait head – probably of the emperor Claudius – whose size was roughly equivalent to that of the goddess. Adolf Furtwängler even dated the Berlin cameo to the Claudian period, not having noticed the reworked portrait.
The Berlin cameo can be grouped with a small number of other Roman cameos that portray an emperor being borne into the sky by one or two eagles. This series of cameos seems to begin in the reign of Claudius and ends with Julian the Apostate in AD 363. Therefore the Berlin cameo, with its original portrait head, counts as one of the earliest instances of such a complex panegyric glorification of a Roman emperor in semi-precious stone.