Marble statuette of a woman

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The figure is a reduced version of a type that is known in numerous Roman copies. The inscription on the base of our example gives the name Europa. She is best known as the princess carried off to Crete by Zeus in the form of a bull. Their children were Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Sarpedon. Thanks to depictions in vase-paintings, other representations are known of Europa standing and wrapped in a cloak, rather than seated on the back of a bull. The identity of the work, however, remains a subject of scholarly discussion.

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