File talk:Clay Lamp with loving Couple.jpg

A false oil lamp

(This lamp probabily is not ancient, but a modern false.) --DenghiùComm (talk) 18:17, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Nonsense. --Marcus Cyron 23:18, 3 ago 2010

Nonsense?

This picture shows not an ancient roman oil lamp but a modern false.

• The clay is uniform and doughy, clearly purify by machine and not manually. The colour is rose, an unusual color for oil lamps and generally for roman ceramics, without the socalled "arretine ceramic", which never produced oil lamps.
• The form is a very bad mixture between a round oil lamp of the first imperial period with erotic scene (like this), and an oval late roman oil lamp which never had figurative scenes (like this) without religious symbols (like this other). Simply this kind of oil lamp doesn't exist, as it's possible to show in this little set of samples.
• Ancient oil lamps of the Roman imperial period with figurative scenes have always a brown or red or yellow or grey varnishing. This oil lamp have not.
• The subject seems usual, but it's not. The sex position 69 doesen't exist in ancient roman art, not in frescos and not even on oil lamps.
• For his outer face, this kind of oil lamps shows always one or more round engravings on the shoulder which contains the figurative scenes. This oil lamp has no one.
• In all roman oil lamps from the first century A.D. the discus with the figurative scene is always concave; this discus is flat.
• The object, an "ancient roman" oil lamp do not shows burning traces on the nozzle, so it's a new object, what is very suspect for an old oil lamp.
• By the technical point of view, an ancient roman oil lamp was made with molds: first the part of the fuel chamber, and afterwards the discus which was apply on it. In all imperial oil lamps it's possible to see the suture on the shoulder of the lamp. This oil lamp doesn't show any suture. It seems to be one piece. And this is impossible for an ancient roman oil lamp.

For all this reasons we can surely affirm that the oil lamp show in this picture is a false. It's a very bad imitation of a roman oil lamp, made for tourist souvenir. If this oil lamp is part of a collection of ancient greek and roman ceramics, it's a shame, but not for the subject, for the object! --DenghiùComm (talk) 23:43, 7 September 2010 (UTC)