Gilt faience fragment of an oinochoe (jug)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

in high relief, woman with a cornucopia Faience oinochoai depicting Ptolemaic queens were made in Alexandria, Egypt and served as ritual and commemorative vessels in ruler cults in cities throughout the Ptolemaic kingdom. The Athenian provenance of this fragment suggests that these jugs were also exported to places in the Mediterranean basin where the Ptolemies would have wished to assert their cultural position through the imagery on them, which functioned as visual disseminators of the Ptolemaic ideology. Complete examples of these vases allow us to place this fragment in context. It is likely that the entire relief depicted the queen with her back to a pillar pouring a libation with a phiale in her outstrectched right hand, towards an altar. A cornucopia is a feature of all known examples of these oinochoai and alludes to the abundant richness of the Ptolemaic kingdom.

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