Terracotta conical lekythos-oinochoe (combination oil flask and jug)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This piece and 36.11.9 are said to have been found together in Attica. They belong to a large class of unglazed vases that were made during the late eighth and early seventh centuries BCE. They have been exported in many parts of the Greek world, as far as Sicily. The production center is usually attributed to the Argolid (Peloponnese), where these vases are particularly present. The technique is highly interesting. As their irregular contours suggest, they were not thrown on the wheel but built and roughly tooled by hand—hence the flat bottoms and the perpendicular marks on the necks. The necks were apparently rolled separately over a cylindrical object, to judge by the regularity of their inner contours. Some vases of this class are undecorated; others, like this pair, have motifs executed with a tool called a toothed-wheel, a kind of cylinder applied on clay. Only the straight lines were incised free hand. The Museum's examples are unusual in having double handles. Note the tiny "nipples" applied on the body of this example.

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.