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Glass alabastron (perfume bottle)

Period:
Early Hellenistic
Date:
late 4th–early 3rd century B.C.
Culture:
Greek, Eastern Mediterranean
Medium:
Glass; core-formed, Group II
Dimensions:
3 5/16 × 1 1/4 × 1 1/8 in. (8.4 × 3.1 × 2.8 cm)
Diam. of rim: 1 1/4 in. (3.1 cm)
Classification:
Glass
Credit Line:
Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917
Accession Number:
17.194.793
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 159
Opaque light turquoise green, with handles in same color; trails in opaque white and opaque yellow.
Broad, flat rim-disk, slanting to one side; short cylindrical neck; almost imperceptible sloping shoulder; straight-sided cylindrical body, tapering upward; uneven pushed-in bottom; at top of body, two lug handles, applied over trail pattern, both with tooled upward indents.
A yellow trail attached to edge of rim-disk; another yellow trail and a white trail, applied after the yellow, wound spirally from top of body in alternate lines down to edge of bottom; both tooled, forming almost vertical indents in sides of body, with alternating upward and downward strokes, making a close-set zigzag pattern on lower half of body.
Broken and repaired around middle of body, with cracks and some small holes; dulling and small patches of iridescent milky weathering and encrustation mainly around neck and rim-disk.
Froehner, Wilhelm. 1903. Collection Julien Gréau. Verrerie antique, émaillerie et poterie appartenant à M. John Pierpont Morgan no. 11, p. 6, pl. 3.3, Paris.

Neuburg, Frederic. 1949. Glass in Antiquity. no. 19, pl. VII (top row, fourth from left), London: Salisbury Square.

Timelines
Ancient Greece, 1000 B.C.-1 A.D.

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