Glass unguentarium (perfume bottle)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Translucent light blue, with opaque turquoise green handles, rim-disk, and pad-base; trails in opaque white and uncertain color, appearing opaque reddish brown. Turquoise green trail applied as outsplayed rim-disk around jagged top edge of neck; tall, slender neck, tapering slightly downward; steeply sloping shoulder; elongated piriform body, tapering downward to applied; small pad-base with uneven flat bottom; two small loop handles applied to edge of shoulder and top of body with everted upward angle. White and reddish brown trails attached at top of neck and wound down as alternate spiral lines, tooled into a festoon pattern round upper half of body, with fifteen upward tooling strokes. Intact; some dulling and pitting, especially of turquoise blue additions, and areas of creamy brown weathering and iridescence.

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