The Metropolitan Museum of Art Greek and Roman Art
Fine art Review
Classical Treasures, Bathed in a New Low-cal
The other day, apropos of the Metropolitan Museum's fine, new light-washed galleries for Greek and Roman art, a friend due east-mailed to me a passage by Virgil. In it Aeneas, fleeing the Trojan War, arrives in Carthage and finds a temple for Juno under construction. He pushes open the temple's large bronze doors ("which made the hinges groan," Virgil reports) and "for the commencement time he dared to hope for life." He'south astounded past the skill of the craftsmen and by the nobility and precision of a painting of the war. He starts to cry.
"It was only a motion-picture show, just, sighing deeply, he let his thoughts feed on information technology, and his confront was moisture with a stream of tears," Virgil writes.
The power of ancient art has to practise with its ability, as my friend put it, "to embody bully acts and communicate their man dimension." Rome became the model for Western culture from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment.
I'm non certain exactly when its pre-eminence began to fade, only in 1949 a young, populist Met manager named Francis Henry Taylor decided to turn the Roman courtroom, the literal and symbolic climax of the building's southern wing, into a restaurant, which devolved into a cafeteria. Plenty of New Yorkers grew up learning from this arrangement that eating a nutted cheese sandwich at Chock full o'Nuts before going to the museum was a thriftier option than ownership a tuna sandwich once y'all got in that location.
It was a life lesson, just non the kind that Virgil wrote about.
Fortunately, now, abreast the humongous column from the Temple of Artemis at Sardis, which marked the archway to the cafeteria, where mobs used to crane their necks looking non like Aeneas for hope and inspiration but for the beef stew, yous can instead gaze up at huge architectural fragments from the same temple, including one with the sort of egg-and-sprint molding that inspired the Met's facade by Richard Morris Hunt.
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Like endless public institutions in America, the Met aped Rome considering Rome stood for borough order, empire and reason. Greek and Roman art weren't the simply celebrated arts of consequence, a lesson the museum taught long earlier it became fashionable to disparage classical culture. But Rome was a standard against which to mensurate other cultures, including our own.
Western artists e'er had, from Michelangelo, who aspired to equal the Belvedere torso, to Picasso, whose "Adult female in White" at the Met is unimaginable without classical art. Going from the Greek and Roman galleries to the Picasso is something you can simply do there. Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky used to haunt these galleries during the 1930s and '40s and loved the Pompeiian frescoes, whose influence you can meet in their works, not far abroad.
Those frescoes, from luxurious ancient villas on the Bay of Naples, take been cleaned and moved from the museum entrance hall, where tourists used to mistake them for the coat-check concession. They are reinstalled side by side to the Roman court, where they expect magnificent. I hadn't noticed until lately all the phalluses on the rooftops of the fantasy buildings, painted in cinnabar and bluish, which decorate the murals from a chamber buried by Vesuvius. The opulence of these scenes suggests something of what inspired Aeneas.
The court, with its burbling fountain, is the centerpiece of the new galleries, which officially open today, and it's a terrific souvenir to New York, a vast, skylighted, blusterous new public space, chilly with all the newly scrubbed marble and naked light but aptly lofty.
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It would be wrong to say that everything on view is wonderful. There are garden-variety sculptures from Roman baths and archaeological fragments more meaningful to specialists than to the residue of the states, forth with imperial portrait busts, funerary reliefs and the Badminton sarcophagus, whose reputation belies the fact that it's a bit over the tiptop. The Met's Greek and Roman collection is enormous merely not like the collections in Athens, Rome, Naples, London, Paris or Berlin, congenital around stupendous masterworks.
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You lot can say, though, that information technology tells the whole story. With the Greek galleries, finished eight years agone, Western antiquity from the Statuary Age through the reign of Constantine at present unfolds in logical, stately order, every bit was intended from the museum'southward early on days. Thousands of objects have been exhumed from storage (it's about time) and animated by new touch-screen computers (useful up to a betoken) and by air and sun.
In total there are 57,000 square feet of exhibition infinite for classical antiquity, around 30,000 for Rome alone, equivalent to all the galleries at the Whitney Museum combined. Y'all tin go out Rome into African art then get straight into modern fine art, which depended on both Rome and Africa for utterly different ideas about the human body.
That itinerary, richly detailed and arrived at over the years equally the Met evolved, argues strongly for the universal museum — the encyclopedic collection, modeled after Diderot — a concept lately assaulted past lawyers, archaeologists and advocates of nationalism.
I'thousand with the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah on this score. Looted art, proved as stolen, must be repatriated. But only in a narrow legal sense does patrimony necessarily belong to modern states occupying lands where ancient cultures once were. The Taliban demonstrated how dubious that claim may exist when they blew upward the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan.
Respect for other cultures tin can come not just from returning an object to where it came from but also from "holding onto it considering you value it yourself," Mr. Appiah has written. My epistolary friend sent me a 2nd e-mail message. In 1430, he pointed out, the Italian humanist and volume hunter Poggio Bracciolini acquired some Greek sculptures by the great Polyclitus and Praxiteles. A caput of Bacchus, Bracciolini told a young man classical devotee, "ought to experience thou, for if he deserves lodging anywhere it is certainly in my land, where he is particularly worshiped." Bracciolini even enlisted Donatello to check out his Greek collection.
The point is that objects have one meaning to those who fabricated them, others to those who discover or buy them centuries later, and all the same other meanings for those who come upon them in a museum. Their different careers ensure immortality. Rising nationalism is an alarming tendency equally far as this goes. Archeologists who at present argue that antiquities are meliorate served in the dirt where they came from than dispersed among public museums like the Met imply that they prefer the by remain dead and buried. The last thing Italy needs today is another Roman vase.
Philippe de Montebello, the Met director, has often described his museum every bit a "cultural family tree in which every visitor can observe his roots." True enough, nevertheless the implicit imperialism. The legacy of Rome is shared by countless people who go to the museum, and not merely by modern-day Italians.
Fulfilling a program initiated by his predecessor, Thomas Hoving, Mr. de Montebello has done the Met and the metropolis — and everybody — incalculable good by pushing through this project, which in so many ways goes against the grain. It's non nearly celebrity architecture. It'southward non politically correct. The timing is awful, since so much attending is focused on looting. But it is most reiterating an ideal for art and for the museum, about extolling the drove, which is the public's heritage, seen by millions, and about doing the difficult affair because it is right.
Did I fail to mention the art? Well, virtue before pleasure, since Rome has been the discipline. Hither are a couple of works in the new galleries y'all might overlook, then you tin accept it from there. The Etruscan drove on the mezzanine, 1 of the best in the earth, with the famous chariot lately restored, is excellent, merely tucked away in the back is a tiny miracle of antique carving, a clamper of glowing bister, that is piece of cake to miss. It'south in the shape of a human being and woman entwined. He reclines beside her, holding her in his arms. She's reclining too, wearing a pointy hat and holding a small vase in one hand, gently touching its mouth with her other mitt, equally if nearly to cascade something mayhap. Peradventure information technology'south a love potion. Shades of Tristan and Isolde.
And in what'due south called the Hellenistic Treasury, in that location's a figurine of a dancer wearing a mask. Information technology's a small bronze sculpture, non nine inches tall, the Isadora Duncan of ancient Alexandria. Draped in layers, she twists similar a corkscrew, her body — the curve of her back, her buttocks and muscled thighs — outlined by the taut fabric. The thinnest veil hides her face, and her head tilts discreetly behind one shoulder, a slippered human foot emerging, suggestively, from beneath her robes.
She'south all virtuosity and grace. You lot can detect in sculptures by Matisse and Richard Serra the influence of her torqued, complicated eloquence, transformed and transmuted through intermediaries like Borromini and Canova.
If you want to know why Greek and Roman art matters eternally, she's your answer.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/20/arts/design/20anci.html
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