Glass alabastron (perfume bottle)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Translucent cobalt blue, with handles in same color; trails in opaque white and opaque yellow. Thin, inward-sloping rim-disk; tall, slanting, cylindrical neck, with marked horizontal line at base; short, rounded shoulder; elongated oval body with upward taper; convex bottom; below shoulder, two vertical ring handles with knobbed tails, applied over trails. One white trail attached at edge of rim-disk; another applied below shoudder and wound down in tight spiral on upper part of body, where a second broader trail in yellow is added, mingling with the first, then both tooled into a close-set zigzag pattern around middle of body, formed by uneven shallow vertical tooling indents; below this, white trail continues in an uneven spiral around lower part of body; another white trail applied to outer edge of one handle. Broken and repaired with numerous holes in body and half of rim-disk missing; dulling, deep pitting and weathering, 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