Glass amphoriskos (perfume bottle)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Translucent cobalt blue, with handles in same color; trails in opaque white. Broad, inward-sloping rim-disk with radiating tool marks on upper surface; cylindrical neck tapering upward; broad rounded shoulder; top-shaped body; circular base-knob with with rounded edge and slightly concave bottom; two vertical strap handles applied to top of shoulder, drawn up, and pressed onto neck and underside of disk-rim. One trail attached at edge of rim-disk; another applied as an uneven pad on shoulder, wound spirally round one and a half times to junction of shoulder and body, then tooled into an uneven close-set zigzag pattern on upper half of body, with twenty-seven alternating upward and downward tooling strokes forming vertical ribs in sides; below this, same trail continues in a spiral to base-knob; part of a fine unmarvered trail runs horizontally around upper body over zigzag pattern. Intact; slight dulling but very little 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.

Metropolitan Museum of Art