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Zmilampis, Cat's-eye

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342
ZMILAMPIS.
Amongst the Marlborough Gems one of the most curious is a singular conversion of a monster Cat's-eye, 1-1/2 inch high, into a lion's head admirably carved out in full relief. The play of colours imparts to the grim mask a vivid reality of life and fury, rendering it a most successful achievement of the school, the Cinque-cento that produced it, whose taste, ever stimulated by the love of the grotesque, revelled in similar analogies between the subject and the material. To the same age is due the Hope " Mexican Sun-Opal," 1 x 3/4 inch in size, richly lustred with shades of red, green, and blue, and as appropriately converted into a head of Phoebus.
The Italian name is Belocchio, evidently a corruption of the Beli Oculus of the Romans ; but the name has been transferred to the Cat's-eye on no sufficient grounds, the Beli Oculus (Baal's-eye) having been merely some brightly-shaded variety of the Eye-Onyx : " for in it (55) a transparent white belt encloses a black pupil, having a golden colour shining out from the centre, and on account of its appearance consecrated to the supreme god of Assyria." These terms prove that three distinct colours were necessary to compose the Beli-Oculus, whereas the Cat's-eye pre­sents one uniform tint, the pupil being formed by the mere re­flexion of light, and shifting about according as the stone is turned.
The Beli Oculus of De Boot's age still retains its ancient meaning. He describes it as a minute Eye-Onyx of sovereign virtue for all diseases of the eyes (on the strength of its name no doubt), being placed under the lid, and allowed to work its way into the corner.
Pliny distinguishes, by significant Greek epithets, several vari­eties of the Eye-Onyx, as the Leucopthalmus, of a fiery red en­closing the figure of an eye in opaque white and black (for the pupil) ; and the same stone seems again designated as the Lycoph-thalmus (Wolf's-eye), but presenting four distinct colours, a fiery red enclosing one the colour of blood, in the centre of which was a black spot surrounded by a circle of opaque white, pre­cisely representing the same organ in the wolf. The Trioph-thalmus, produced with the Onyx, presented the figure of a triple human eye.
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