Glass alabastron (perfume bottle)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Opaque light turquoise green, with handles in same color; trails in opaque white and opaque yellow. Broad, flat rim-disk, slanting to one side; short cylindrical neck; almost imperceptible sloping shoulder; straight-sided cylindrical body, tapering upward; uneven pushed-in bottom; at top of body, two lug handles, applied over trail pattern, both with tooled upward indents. A yellow trail attached to edge of rim-disk; another yellow trail and a white trail, applied after the yellow, wound spirally from top of body in alternate lines down to edge of bottom; both tooled, forming almost vertical indents in sides of body, with alternating upward and downward strokes, making a close-set zigzag pattern on lower half of body. Broken and repaired around middle of body, with cracks and some small holes; dulling and small patches of iridescent milky weathering and encrustation mainly around neck and rim-disk.

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