Marble statuette of a slave boy with a lantern

Marble statuette of a slave boy with a lantern

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Adaptation of a Hellenistic work of the 3rd century B.C. This statuette is a good example of a well-known subject, the servant waiting to escort his master home. A Hellenistic terracotta statuette from the Fayum, Egypt provides the earliest known evidence for this type. The subject was popular in Roman times, when marble examples served as fountain sculptures in villa gardens in Pompeii and Syria, and bronze and silver variations were made into luxurious household objects such as inkwells and pepper-castors.

Greek and Roman Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Marble statuette of a slave boy with a lanternMarble statuette of a slave boy with a lanternMarble statuette of a slave boy with a lanternMarble statuette of a slave boy with a lanternMarble statuette of a slave boy with a lantern

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.