Glass alabastron (perfume bottle)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Translucent cobalt blue, with handles in same color; trails in opaque yellow. Broad horizontal rim-disk with radiating tooling marks around narrow mouth; short cylindrical neck; sloping shoulder; straight-sided cylindrical body, with upward taper; slightly convex bottom; below shoulder, two vertical ring handles, unpierced, applied over trail pattern. A yellow trail attached at edge of rim-disk; another yellow trail applied from shoulder in spiral and extending to edge of bottom, tooled into an inverted festoon pattern with eleven unevenly-spaced downward strokes. Intact; dulling, some deep pitting holes, and faint iridescent weathering.

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