Glass ribbed bowl

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Translucent cobalt blue; trail in opaque white. Knocked-off, uneven rim; deep concave neck; narrow sloping shoulder; squat globular body curving in to flat bottom. Thick trail wound spirally around bottom, then becoming finer as it continues up side, ending on edge of shoulder; sides tooled into twenty-four, unevenly-spaced, vertical ribs. Intact; pinprick and some elongated bubbles; dulling, slight pitting, faint iridescence, and weathering of trail around side between ribs. Ribbed bowls like these, often decorated with opaque white trails, were very popular throughout the Roman world and may be seen as successors to the cast ribbed bowls of the first century B.C. to the early first century A.D. A major center of production was probably located in Northern Italy or the province of Pannonia along the main route to the Danube frontier.

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