Glass aryballos (perfume bottle)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Translucent blue, with same color handles; trails in opaque yellow and opaque pale turquoise blue. Broad inward-sloping rim-disk; cylindrical neck; angular shoulder; almost spherical body; convex, slightly flattened bottom; two vertical ring handles with flattened tails, applied over trail decoration, extend from shoulder to neck. Yellow trail applied to outer edge of rim-disk; another yellow trail applied unevenly on shoulder and wound spirally down, at first in horizontal lines, then tooled into a close-set zigzag pattern around central section of body; turquoise blue trails applied over yellow, also forming part of the zigzag pattern; below this, a yellow trail wound horizontally twice around body. Intact; white gritty impurities in body; dulling and pitting, and patches of milky weathering and iridescence.

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