Glass amphoriskos (perfume bottle)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Opaque white, with knob-base in same color; trail in translucent purple. Sloping shoulder; tall conical body tapering to rounded point; large circular base-knob with rounded edge and flat bottom. Thick unmarvered trail wound round in a spiral on shoulder, then tooled on body into zigzag pattern, extending to knob-base, with long vertical tooling indents in alternating upward and downward strokes, forming prominent rounded ribs around body. Broken and repaired, with rim-disk, neck, handles, and almost half of body missing; some pitting and iridescent weathering. This broken bottle shows how the interior of the vessel retained considerable traces of the core, made of sand, clay, and a binding agent, around which the molten glass was applied to form the vessel.

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