Glass gold-band mosaic bottle
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
Translucent cobalt blue, translucent turquoise blue and opaque yellow partially mixed together to appear green, opaque white, and colorless encasing shattered gold leaf. Everted, horizontal rim with rounded outer lip; cylindrical neck; sloping shoulder; small carinated body, with straight side above and curving side below point of greatest diameter; flat bottom. Gold-band mosaic pattern formed from a single serpentine length of layered canes formed in the following order: blue outlined in white, blue, colorless with gold leaf, and green outlined in white and blue; the length is wound three times round body, being fused together across bottom. Intact; slight dulling and pitting, and faint iridescent weathering; encrustation on inside of neck. Rotary grinding marks on exterior. Gold-band cast glass was a particularly opulent type of early Roman glassware. It combines canes of brightly colored translucent and opaque glass with strips of gold leaf encased between layers of colorless glass. Only a limited number of vessel shapes were made in this way, and some of the most common are small globular or carinated bottles such as these. Similar shapes are also found amongst the earliest free-blown and mold-blown bottles that made glass cheap and accessible to most Romans. Gold-band glass, however, was undoubtedly a luxury product that only the very rich could afford.
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.