Glass aryballos (perfume bottle)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Opaque dark purple, appearing black, with lighter red brown streaks, with same color handles; trails in opaque yellow and opaque turquoise blue. Inward-sloping rim-disk with rough protruding edge to mouth; short concave neck; broad sloping shoulder; almost spherical body; convex, slightly uneven bottom; two ring handles with knobbed tails extend from shoulder to neck and underside of rim-disk. A yellow trail applied to outer edge of rim-disk, with top of neck folded over part of trail; yellow and turquoise blue trails applied in a band around the upper half of body and tooled into a close-set zigzag pattern, formed by uneven, shallow vertical tooling indents; below this, two separate yellow and turquoise blue trails added vertically to lower body and wound once round bottom in an irregular swirl; one raised yellow blob on edge of shoulder on one side. Intact, except for one small chip in rim-disk; dulling, pitting, and heavily weathered with patches of milky white 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