Pair of gold earrings with four relief faces

Pair of gold earrings with four relief faces

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hoop of plain gold with hook and eye clasp, decorated below with an applied small disk modeled as a Black African's head. Threaded on the hoop by means of a small suspension ring is a box-like hollow pendant with a slightly concave undecorated base. The four rectangular sides are embossed with alternating heads of a youth and a bearded man, all facing left. The vertical edges of the box are decorated with soldered-on strips of milled wire. The top of the box is decorated with a pyramid of larger and smaller granules. Attached to the top corners of the box are two intersecting transverse strips, slightly triangular in section, on top of which is soldered the small suspension ring mentioned above

Greek and Roman Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Pair of gold earrings with four relief facesPair of gold earrings with four relief facesPair of gold earrings with four relief facesPair of gold earrings with four relief facesPair of gold earrings with four relief faces

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.