Marble relief fragment with the head of Medea

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Copy of a Greek marble relief of ca. 420–410 B.C. This head is from a well-known relief that depicts the witch Medea and the two daughters of Pelias, king of Iolkos, in Thessaly. Medea tricked them into killing and boiling their father in hopes of rejuvenating him, and the scene shows them at a cauldron about to commit the terrible act. The original work was one of four reliefs that probably decorated the parapet surrounding the Altar of the Twelve Gods in the Athenian Agora.

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