Brick Seal

BRICK SEAL. - A stamp that the Romans impressed on ceramic manufactures, especially plates, vases, tiles and bricks. It proves very useful for determining the age of objects and especially of buildings by means of the bricks used in them. Such stamps then give us much interesting information about the organization of the workshops, especially at Rome.

Brick stamps (b.) are found from the end of the republic, when short tiles began to be used for firing. With the advent of the peace of the Church, Christian elements were then also introduced into them, generally crosses or monograms. The most common and most characteristic examples at Rome are those of the Claudiana workshop, with a fine Christological monogram at the center; those manufactured by a certain Cassius, with a Greek b.

followed by the famous Christian cryptogram XMI, and the tiles of the Gothic kings Theodoric and Athalaric. Outside Rome, the Spanish examples from the time of the Visigoths are particularly interesting. Very frequent in Andalusia is the b. Bracari vivori cum iuis around A_{X}S_{X}S_{X}; in one there occurs the fine invocation spes in deo, in another the motto aedificat X(ristus). In Africa (Cilium) there is the invocation †s(an)cta Maria a(di)uba nos †. Much less frequent than on bricks are the Christian b. of other objects. A shadow [sic] of the Lateran museum found in the cemetery of Ciriaca bears the inscription spes in deo, which seems to be the name of the manufacturer; on another from Modena, Cavedoni saw depicted two fish facing each other at the Christological monogram.

Antonio Ferna