The new Greek and Roman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (opened April 20) are the triumphant result of 15 years of re-design, including five years of construction. They are magnificent. As you walk through the Leon Levy and Shelby White Court (site of the former cafeteria), illuminated by skylights, you can feel as if you are in the sculpture garden of an ancient Roman patrician.
The floor is colored marble, and a second story has been added to enhance the original grand design of the gallery, originally installed between 1912 and 1926. Of course, many of the sculptures, in all their magnificence, are missing heads or noses (one lower torso of an athelete is connected to the statue’s foot by a thick chromium rod replacing a missing calf, evoking ancient Special Olympics), but the damage to ancient pieces sculpture and architectural ruins has been a part of our classical aesthetic since the eighteenth century and even before.
Indeed, the provenance of some of these pieces includes an international pedigree of former owners, linking the collection not just visibly to its ancient origins, but invisibly (but easily ascertained) to English and American collectors of the past 250 years.
The largest collection of its kind outside of Italy — where state-run archeological museums are mostly underfunded and understaffed — the 5300 items on display in the Greek and Roman gallery come mostly from the Met’s own vaults (it makes one wonder how many treasures it owns but has no room to show). Most have not been seen since 1949, and many have never been on display before now.
Historically the most sigificnant piece on display may well be the Hope Dionysos, so called for the famous English art collector Thomas Hope (1769-1831), an author on architecture and interior design, who acquired it in 1796, and for whom the Hope Diamond is also named. Standing nearly seven feet tall, the marble statue depicts a relaxed Dionysius in a semi-slouch, dressed in a panther skin over his short chiton and long sandals, with an archaic-style Greek female figure under his extended left arm. The statue was restored in the eighteenth century and was last publicly seen in the early twentieth century, before it was purchased by the Museum in 1990, and is only just now placed on view.
The superb level of quality represented by the Hope Dionysus is sustained throughout the exhibit, to include many lifelike portrait heads (including one of the first Roman Emperor Augustus), as well as those on funerary pieces, fabulously detailed sarcophagi depicting mythological scenes, household and luxury items, including a rare painted glass, magnificent irridescent glass bowls, golden arm bands, a glass wine bucket, a mosaic of Africa, with natives and a crocodile, a second-century four-inch silver bust of Sarpis, a 1.5 inch sardonyx cameo of Augustus, and a foot-high black bronze statue of a veiled dancer in mid-step, her facial features barely visible beneath the veil surface.
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The galleries are divided historically, ranging from Greek art from around 900 BCE to late imperial Roman art of the Fourth Century CE, including extensive collections of art from the Hellenistic period (Greco-Roman art from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE until the accession of Augustus in 31 BCE), Augustan, Imperial and late empire art, and Etruscan art.
There is a complete bed, with red-painted base and with legs carved in ivory, and most amazing of all, two complete rooms with magnificent frescos from Boscoreale, near Pompeii, that were originally buried under the ashes of Mt. Vesuvius, acquired by the museum in 1903, and only now on display! More impressive is the bedroom, or cubiculum nocturnum, painted with higgledy-piggledy city scenes, that could have been inspired by Di Chirico.
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It’s important to remember that with all this magnificence, we’re looking at the holdings of a very thin layer of Roman society—the wealthiest patricians and royal families, whom these wonderful artists and artisans served. Located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Metropolitan Museum of Art sits amid one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the world, so it’s as if one aristocracy speaks across the ages to another. We know the names of some of the original Roman owners of these treasures, who become much more real to us as people as we contemplate the objects they handled and took pride in.
Would they have shown them to us commoners? It’s doubtful. But the Met is public. Take advantage.
[photos: Joel Simpson]
