The Matterozzi collection of Early Christian gold-glass at the British Museum: An investigation of textual records and an edition of archival sources.

This article focuses on the eighteenth-century collector Alessandro Matterozzi (1713–1783) and his significant collection of Early Christian gold-glass, a decorative glass technique involving gold leaf between layers of glass. Matterozzi assembled one of the largest collections of such gold-glass pieces, primarily bases of glass vessels from Early Christian catacombs, which were displayed in a dedicated chapel within his family palace in Urbania, Italy. Seventeen fragments from his collection were acquired by the British Museum in 1863, though some pieces remain elsewhere, such as at the Corning Museum of Glass and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Archival documents, including drawings from Gaetano Marini’s *Inscriptiones christianae* and correspondence from contemporaries, provide detailed evidence of the collection’s composition, display, and historical significance within the context of eighteenth-century Christian antiquarianism.