Glass amphoriskos (perfume bottle)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Translucent pale blue, with handles in translucent greenish yellow; trail in opaque yellow. Thin rim-disk, sloping deeply inward, with jagged vertical lip to mouth; tall cylindrical neck; broad angular shoulder; elongated ovoid body, turning in to almost pointed bottom; vestiges of two vertical strap handles applied over trails in large pads on shoulder and pressed on to top neck. Yellow trail applied to edge of rim-disk, wound spirally down neck and across shoulder, then tooled into a close-set festoon pattern to lower body, with twenty-three uneven upward strokes, forming slight vertical ribbing on sides, and continuing in thick spiral lines to pointed bottom. Cracks around rim and in body, with most of handles and all of base-knob missing; some pitting, most of surface covered with creamy brown weathering and iridescence.

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