Glass flask

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Translucent yellow green; handles and trails in translucent green. Rim folded over and in, and smoothed into flaring mouth; slender cylindrical neck, with horizontal tooling indent around base; elongated piriform body, with horizontal tooling around base; tubular splayed base ring, made by folding; bottom with central knob and pontil scar; two handles applied as trails to lower body, drawn up side to just below base of neck, then drawn up, up, and in, forming loops, and trailed off upwards over decoration around neck. Single horizontal trail wound once around underside of mouth; another trail wound once around neck just below mid-point; handle trails notched fifteen times along length. Intact; some bubbles, elongated in neck; dulling and iridescent weathering, with some soil encrustation on interior. Flasks with two loop handles, each with a long pincered trail down the side of the body, form a distinctive group of late Roman glassware from the East. Examples have been recorded from rock-tombs at sites in modern Israel and Jordan.

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