Terracotta brazier

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

One of the braziers (96.18.96, ca. 600 B.C.) is decorated with two different cylinder stamps, one showing a standard animal procession, the other depicting a boar hunt that is known only from five examples excavated at San Giovenale. The other brazier (19.192.53, ca. 550 B.C.) is stamped with a scene of a man and two dogs chasing a hare into a net held by a second man. Such friezes were popular on Protocorinthian vases and Etruscan Pontic ware. The fragment (23.160.94, ca. 540–530 B.C.) depicts pairs of lions attacking a bull and a doe, a subject that was adapted by the Etruscans from Near Eastern and Greek prototypes and that also appears on the Monteleone Chariot (03.23.1), which is on view in this gallery.

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