Glass alabastron (perfume bottle)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Translucent cobalt blue, with handles in same color; trails in opaque white. Slightly concave horizontal rim-disk, with projecting rough edge to mouth; cylindrical neck; narrow rounded shoulder; slightly convex sides to cylindrical body, tapering upwards; convex bottom; two vertical ring handles with knobbed tails, applied over trail decoration; one larger and higher than the other. A trail attached at edge of rim-disk; another trail applied on neck in a thick marvered pad, wound down, tooled into an irregular feather pattern, with strokes mixing and blurring trails with blue ground. Intact; dulling, pitting, and patches of brownish weathering.

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