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Glories of the Past
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18897 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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2 / 1991 |
792 Words |
| Author
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Jason Edward Kaufman
Jason Edward Kaufman is an art historian and critic based in
New York. |
There's nothing new about the Metropolitan Museum of Art displaying a comprehensive cross-section of the arts of the ancient world. What distinguishes the present exhibit is that it is composed not of the museum's own renowned holdings, but a wholly new array of masterpieces. Astonishingly, the two-hundred-work exhibition is not an intermuseum loan. Glories of the Past: Ancient Art from the Shelby White and Leon Levy Collection is drawn entirely from a private collection, one of the most remarkable of its kind.
The collection contains domestic items, religious objects, and portraits that date from 6000 B.C. to A.D. 500, and span Europe, the Mediterranean region, and Western Mongolia, offering an amazingly broad, yet cogent and high-quality survey of prehistoric and classical civilizations. These objects' consistently high level of technical sophistication, their formal elegance, and their generally exceptional state of preservation, evince the impeccable standards of connoisseurship maintained by Shelby White and Leon Levy.
The collectors have relied not only on their own good taste and judgment but also on the wise counsel of scholars. Of course, it helps to have both considerable wealth (Levy is a successful investor and a member of the boards of companies in the United States and United Kingdom) as well as good connections (both Levy and White have served on the board of the American School of Oriental Research, and Levy sponsors an expedition in Ashkelon, Israel, a site rich in biblical archaeological remains). How else could such a panoply of treasures have been assembled in a mere two decades?
The works are arranged geographically beginning with the neolithic and early bronze-age carvings from the Cycladic island group in the Aegean sea, then moving to the Greek and Etruscan world, the ancient Near East and Central Asia (Anatolia, Northern Syria, Mesopotamia, Bactria, Iran), and concluding with the Roman empire and late-antique Europe.
Among the prehistoric marble figurines from the Cyclades is a reclining female (2700-2600 B.C.) of the kind that prevailed for half a millennium. To make carving less difficult and breakage less likely, the artist placed the arms across the torso--the same composition found in a 8,000-year-old black steatite fertility goddess carved in Asia Minor. These figures are believed to have represented the life-controlling deity and were placed in graves in order to ensure rebirth. Accordingly, the figurine's abdomen swells slightly, suggesting
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