Glass alabastron (perfume bottle)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Translucent blue, with handles in same color; trails in opaque white. Rim-disk with thick rounded edge, uneven and sloping inward, with projecting jagged inner edge to neck; slender cylindrical neck, slanting to one side; straight-sided fusiform body expanding downward, then tapering in to pointed bottom; two large horizontal lug handles applied over trail at top of body. Trail wound unevenly around edge of rim; another thick trail attached at bottom, drawn up in a spiral to point of carination, tooled into a close-set feather pattern around side, arranged in five panels of alternating upward and downward strokes, wound round again in spiral, and ending in irregular wavy line on edge of rim. Intact, but with slight surface chipping; some dulling with creamy 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