Glass aryballos (perfume bottle)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Semi opaque turquoise green, with same color handles; trails in opaque yellow and possibly opaque turquoise blue. Uneven inward-sloping rim-disk; cylindrical neck; broad angular shoulder; almost spherical body; convex bottom, with linear tooling indent across it; two vertical ring handles with knobbed tails, applied over trail decoration, extend from top of body to underside of rim-disk; handles are not directly opposite each other but rather more to one side. A yellow trail applied to outer edge of rim-disk; another yellow trail applied on shoulder and wound spirally, at first in horizontal lines, then tooled into a close-set zigzag pattern around central section of body, where another broader trail is added to the zigzag, mingling with the yellow; below, a fine yellow trail wound horizontally twice around body. Complete except for chip in rim-disk; film of whitish weathering and brilliant iridescence covering most of bottle.

Greek and Roman Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Museum's collection of Greek and Roman art comprises more than thirty thousand works ranging in date from the Neolithic period (ca. 4500 B.C.) to the time of the Roman emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity in A.D. 312. It includes the art of many cultures and is among the most comprehensive in North America. The geographic regions represented are Greece and Italy, but not as delimited by modern political frontiers: Greek colonies were established around the Mediterranean basin and on the shores of the Black Sea, and Cyprus became increasingly Hellenized. For Roman art, the geographical limits coincide with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The department also exhibits the art of prehistoric Greece (Helladic, Cycladic, and Minoan) and pre-Roman art of Italic peoples, notably the Etruscans.

Metropolitan Museum of Art