Glass amphoriskos (perfume bottle)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Translucent blue, with same color pad-base; handles in translucent greenish yellow; trail in opaque yellow. Narrow rim-disk, sloping inward with prominent jagged vertical lip to mouth; cylindrical neck, expanding downward; broad convex sloping shoulder; straight-sided body, tapering downward; small circular pad-base, flattened on underside and with round edge; vestiges of two vertical s-shaped handles on outer edge of shoulder and neck. Yellow trail applied to edge of rim-disk, wound spirally down neck and across shoulder, then tooled into a festoon pattern on body with sixteen upward strokes, and continuing in almost horizontal lines around pad-base at bottom. Broken and repaired, almost all of handles missing, cracks and small holes on sholuder and top of body; dulling, pitting, iridescent weathering around rim-disk and neck, and creamy brown weathering on body and especially on trail.

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