ART

A man who looks after the pottery and porcelain in the British Museum is going to break a prize exhibit--a $21-million, 2,000-year-old Portland vase from ancient Rome. The 10-inch, four-pound artifact is regarded as one of the finest pieces of early Roman glass. Nigel Williams, the museum’s chief conservator of ceramics, said the vase must be broken and reassembled because the glue holding the blue and white cameo-glass pieces together after two earlier breakages has become yellow and extremely brittle. It was made by a sculptor named Dioscourides and depicts men and women in a leafy glade--probably the courtship of Peleus and the sea-goddess Thetis, who became the parents of the mythical Greek warrior, Achilles. The vase is believed to have belonged to the Emperor Augustus and was discovered in 1582 in a tomb near Rome.