Displaying items by tag: vessels

Two New York philanthropists are donating a major collection of more than 300 ancient Greco-Roman and Near-Eastern glass vessels to The Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

The gift from Robert and Renee Belfer was announced by the museum Wednesday. It comes as the institution celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. An exhibition titled “A Roman Villa — The Belfer Collection” showcasing approximately 100 of the objects will be on view at The Israel Museum from June 5 through Nov. 21.

The collection is “one of the most important private holdings of antiquities anywhere,” museum Director James Snyder said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem.

Glassmaking originated around 2500 B.C. in Mesopotamia, and by the mid-first millennium B.C. it had spread throughout the ancient world. The number of vessels made from glass remained limited, however, until the introduction of two important technical advances—the use of the blowpipe and closed multipart molds—in the late first century B.C. and the early first century A.D., respectively. These advances revolutionized the glass industry under the Roman Empire, making glass vessels accessible to all and allowing producers to create a wide range of shapes, sizes, and usages. Some of the earliest vessels made by mold blowing bear the names of the craftsmen who “signed” the molds.

In the early first century A.D. the most outstanding examples of Roman mold-blown glass were made by a craftsman called Ennion, and products of his workshop are the focus of the exhibition "Ennion: Master of Roman Glass," at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is the first exhibition of ancient glass organized by the Metropolitan, which has one of the finest collections of this material in the world.

You can take a close-up look at artifacts, some of which are over 2,000 years old, in the Shards of the Past: Pre-Columbian Art from the Frost Art Museum exhibition, on display from May 7 through August 31.

The exhibition features 26 works…figures, vessels, bowls, and plates…from Peru, Colombia, Mexico and Central America, selected from the Frost Art Museum’s permanent collection. Pre-Columbian refers to the time in the Americas before the arrival of Christopher Columbus and the Spanish explorers. Cultures and civilizations were already flourishing, thriving and evolving, while remaining virtually isolated from other parts of the world. After the arrival of the explorers, we see the collapse of these civilizations and subsequent destruction of their temples and social structures along with a wealth of objects and ritual artifacts. Some of the relics from these cultures are intact for viewers to admire and study; others were ritually broken, and some were destroyed by the passage of time. Most of the surviving objects were found in graves, the remnants of offerings to the dead.