Browse Items (20 total)

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…

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 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,…

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 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…

Museum Description: "This tapestry excited scholarly interest immediately after the Blisses acquired it in 1929. They lent it in 1931 to the first major exhibition of Byzantine art in Paris where, according to Royall Tyler, the French art historian…

Museum Description: “The consummate skill used to create this pendant places it among the most highly accomplished examples of gold jewelry from the early Byzantine period. The elaborate frame around the imperial medallion combines two techniques:…

The four panels depict episodes from Passion and Resurrection of Christ.

Top left: (these vignettes are meant to be read separately) the Judgement and Denial of St. Peter, at left, Pontius Pilate is shown seated, washing his hands in a basin with…