Browse Items (20 total)

Obverse Inscription: DNIVSTINI ANVSPP

D(ominus) N(oster) Iustinianus P(er) P(etuus) AVG(ustus) ("Our Lord Justinian, Eternal Emperor").

A frontal bust portrait of the emperor wearing a helmet, diadem, and cuirass. In his hand is a globus…

The Seuso Platter is one of the 14 silver objects that make up the Seuso Treasure. This hoard of late Roman silver was at the center of decades worth of debate in the international art market, stemming from falsified documentation with regards to the…

Museum Commentary: “Flasks bearing images of Saint Menas are not uncommon in Egypt. Menas was a Roman soldier who was martyred; veneration of him as a saint centered on an oasis near Alexandria. On better-preserved ampullae bearing the same scene,…

Museum Description: "Standing in a blue shell, Aphrodite Anadyomene wrings seawater from her hair. The pose was well known in antiquity, referring to the goddess’s birth from the sea, of which the deep blue color of the lapis lazuli is a visual…

Museum Description: “Portrait, perhaps of a priest, in encaustic on limewood: the panel is cracked through the right side from the upper edge to the subject's proper left ear. A row of four nail holes indicative of reuse, or perhaps of attachment to…

Museum description: “Most ivory and bone containers are really wooden, covered with veneers of ivory. This craftsman chose the more extravagant option of carving the box with its six compartments out of a solid block of ivory, the rounded back…

The Madaba Map is a floor mosaic that contains the oldest surviving cartographic depiction of the Holy Land. It dates to the 6th century and is found at the Church of Saint George in Madaba, Jordan. The presence and absence of various monuments has…

The Vatican Vergil, which contains fragments of Vergil’s Aeneid and Georgics, is one of three surviving illustrated manuscripts of classical literature along with the Vergilius Romanus and the Ambrosian Iliad. Today, the Vatican Vergil consists of 76…

Museum information: “This exceptional painting on wood comes from the monastery of Bawit in Middle Egypt. Dated to the 8th century, it represents Christ (easily recognizable by his halo with a cross) and Abbot Mena, the superior of the monastery at…