Glass alabastron (perfume bottle)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Translucent cobalt blue, with handles in same color; trails in opaque yellow and opaque white. Narrow, inward-sloping rim-disk, with outsplayed rounded edge; short cylindrical neck with tooled indent around base; very small angular shoulder; convex sides to cylindrical body, tapering upwards; convex bottom; two vertical ring handles with knobbed tails, applied over trail decoration. A yellow trail attached at edge of rim-disk; a white trail applied on upper body, wound down, tooled into an inverted festoon pattern, with ten irregular downward strokes mixing and blurring trails with blue ground. Intact; some dulling and encrustation on one side, and faint 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