Glass oinochoe (perfume jug)
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
Translucent cobalt blue, with handle and pad-base in same color; trails in opaque yellow and opaque white. Applied slender trefoil rim-disk with long spout; cylindrical neck; narrow angular shoulder; straight-sided cylindrical body, expanding downward, and then curving in to applied circular pad-base with thick rounded edge and uneven flattish bottom; strap handle attached in pad to top of body over trail decoration, with horizontal tooling indent above pad, drawn up and round in a loop, arching above the rim-disk, and pressed onto back of rim-disk and top of neck. A fine yellow trail attached at edge of rim-disk; another unmarvered yellow trail wound spirally six and a quarter times around neck; a third yellow trail, marvered, begun on lower edge of shoulder and wound round on body, tooled into a close-set feather pattern and extending as far as the point of greatest diameter; mingling with it in alternating bands, white trails in eleven vertical panels with alternating upward and downward strokes; below this, a thick white trail would round in a spiral nearly three times; a fine yellow trail wound round edge of pad-base. Complete, but spout of rim-disk broken and repaired; dulling, pitting, and much of surface covered with creamy white weathering and iridescence. Among the rarer shapes of Mediterranean Group II vessels are the tall, slender oinochoe (pitcher/jug) with a trefoil spout and the lentoid aryballos with twisted glass canes running between the ring handles.
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.