Glass alabastron (perfume bottle)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Translucent blue, streaked with reddish purple, with handles in same color; trails in opaque yellow and opaque turquoise blue. Broad, uneven horizontal rim-disk, with slightly raised edge around mouth, extending down over top of neck and trail decoration; short cylindrical neck; uneven rounded shoulder; straight-sided cylindrical body; convex bottom; two vertical ring handles with knobbed tails, applied over trail decoration. Yellow trail attached at edge of rim-disk; a second yellow trail applied on neck and wound unevenly down in a spiral, then tooled into a close-set zigzag pattern; halfway down pattern a turquoise blue trail is added, mingling with yellow; immediately below this, a third fine yellow trail wound horizontally three and a half times around body. Intact; slight dulling and some pitting holes. Glass vessels such as these first appeared in the Greek world late in the sixth century B.C. They originally contained perfumes or scented oils used in funerary rites, after which the bottles were left in the grave.

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