Glass amphoriskos (perfume bottle)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Translucent yellow green, appearing black; one handle and base-knob in yellow brown, the other handle in yellow green with blue tinge; trails in opaque yellow and opaque white. Inward-sloping oval rim-disk, with uneven tooling indent underneath; tall cylindrical neck, tapering downwards; sloping shoulder; elongated piriform body; globular but misshapen base-knob; two rod handles applied in pads across shoulder over trail decoration, drawn up and slightly out to above rim, then looped in and down; one attached to neck below rim, the other in a double loop to top of neck and underside of rim-disk. Yellow trail applied around lip of rim and then wound in a spiral around neck and shoulder to body, then tooled into a festoon pattern with twenty-seven irregular upward strokes on upper third of body; a thick white trail added over bottom of yellow and also tooled into the same festoon pattern around middle of body and continuing in a plain spiral around lower part of body, ending under base-knob. Intact; pitting of surface bubbles with faint iridescent weathering, and small patches of encrustation.

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