Glass ribbed bowl

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Translucent deep purple; trail in opaque white. Outsplayed rim, with cracked off and ground lip; short concave neck; squat, globular body curving in to flat, thick bottom. Trail applied as a spiral on bottom, then wound up side, ending on neck as a band of fine, irregular horizontal lines; side tooled into twenty-four slender, vertical ribs. Intact, except for one small chip on outer edge of rim; some large and pinprick bubbles; dulling, some pitting, and faint iridescence, with weathering of trail between ribs. Ribbed bowls like these, often decorated with opaque white trails, were very popular throughout the Roman world and may be seen as successors to the cast ribbed bowls of the first century B.C. to the early first century A.D. A major center of production was probably located in Northern Italy or the province of Pannonia along the main route to the Danube frontier.

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