Glass amphoriskos (perfume bottle)
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
Translucent yellowish green; base-knob and handles in translucent light green; trails in opaque greyish light blue and opaque white. Uneven inward-sloping rim-disk, with projecting jagged edge to mouth and tooled indent around underside; tall cylindrical neck, tapering upward; sloping shoulder; elongated piriform body; pointed bottom; spherical base-knob with short cylindrical stem; two vertical s-shaped rod handles applied over trail decoration in folded pads across shoulder, drawn up to base of neck and pressed onto neck below rim-disk. A light blue trail and a white trail applied to underside of rim, wound down in a spiral, sometimes as alternating lines, sometimes with white overlaying blue, around neck and shoulder to body, then tooled into a close-set festoon pattern with thirty-four upward strokes, continuing in a plain spiral around lower part of body with white trail getting thicker, ending under knob-base. Broken and repaired on body with some minor chips, but parts of both handles missing; pitting and dulling, with patches of brownish weathering.
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.