Elegant as a Roman Palace
June 2007
Perched on a chariot, open-mouthed gorgons proclaim their power. A bronze baby Eros sleeps contentedly. Larger-than-life marble statues of Hercules flank a grand court—one version of the muscled hero is young and beardless, the other showing his age. Even the bedroom—or noctorum cubiculum in Latin—of the Boscoreale Villa, buried below Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. and long on view on the main floor of the museum, can be seen anew. Previously it both enticed and frustrated visitors as it opened up beyond a velvet rope. That barrier now removed, visitors have freer visual access to its extraordinary frescoed walls, covered with illusionistic architectural vistas and fantasy gardens in grand color.These are among the 5,300 treasures that greet viewers to the spectacular new Greek and Roman galleries in the south wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The rooms house objects created between about 900 B.C. and the early fourth century A.D., when Emperor Constantine and the Roman Empire fell from power.
Throughout these ancient centuries Romans harnessed the power of water for both practical and aesthetic purposes, for aqueducts, fountains and public baths. They constructed villas with black-walled bedrooms to lure maidens to pleasure and slumber. They transformed Greek bronzes, hiring Greek sculptors to recreate their gods in marble for a Roman audience whose taste favored something more decorative, figures imbued with even more torsion, expression, and grace. Similarly, they used cinnabar and vermilion more lavishly as pigments to lend new degrees of opulence to their frescoes; they also learned to blow glass.
And they advanced portraiture, bringing it into its own, relentlessly commissioning records of their own visages and ever-changing hairstyles. Opulence was their standard, and nothing—from hairpins to dining rooms—escaped their studied demand from sculptors, artists and artisans. Moreover, they imagined a world where anything was possible. Rulers declared themselves gods and reigned ruthlessly; after all, the gods had always possessed human form and under the Romans they took on ever-more-human feelings and foibles, their divinity fading but taking on new life in the persons of actual humans.
New Yorkers, art students and scholars of Roman art have been awaiting this Met opening for four years. To put this in perspective, we should recall that the original concept for the Greek and Roman galleries as envisioned by McKim, Mead and White, the architectural firm that designed the core of the current building, lasted a mere 23 years, from 1926 to 1949. The galleries went off view when a cafeteria, offices and restrooms took their place at mid-century. For the past 15 years, the Met has been redoing its Greek, Roman and Cypriot galleries in fits and starts at great expense—reportedly some $220 million. But also to great effect. The galleries finally form a cohesive whole, stretching the full length of the Met’s southeastern footprint.
The commodious Roman galleries constitute the crown among these jewels, for at 30,000 square feet, they occupy the largest space, befitting a Roman piazza. Indeed the main court, named for the late Leon Levy and his wife Shelby White, admits glorious light via a vaulted arch in glass, designed by architect Kevin Roche (of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo & Associates). Underfoot, granite tiles in alternating squares and circles of sumptuous red and green composites mined from Brazil recall the floor of the Pantheon, the temple in Rome once dedicated to all the gods. To the north is the newly conserved 12-foot Sardis Ionic column (circa 300 B.C.) from Hellenistic Greece, first excavated early in the 20th century.The new galleries are supplemented by a grand expansion of the Met’s online timeline of art history; guides for families and educators; 100 new messages on the Met’s audio guide; a new luxury retail space related to the collection of works from the archaic and classical periods; and a 3,400-work mezzanine-level study collection with six wall-mounted computer touch screens offering a wealth of information.
Carlos Picón, curator-in-charge of Greek and Roman Art, who joined the Met in 1990, says order has finally been brought to the Met’s collection, considered among the finest in the world. “This is the first time since 1949 that you can finally see the entire sweep of ancient Greek to the end of the Roman empire in three city blocks. What we had before had no rhyme or reason: Roman in one gallery, pots here, bronzes there. Now you have a dialogue showing chronologically, thematically, stylistically what happened during this magnificent time in human history.”
Perhaps Picón’s most celebrated acquisition is the over-lifesized Hope Dionysus, which had been packed away for more than five years. Picón bought it at auction in 1990 for $220,000, his first purchase for the museum. This marble, named for the prominent collector Thomas Hope who acquired it in 1796 and once owned by the great grandson of Benjamin Franklin, Francis Howard, is an adaptation dating to approximately 27 B.C.-68 A.D. of a fourth century B.C. Greek statue of Dionysus. The god of wine and divine intoxication wears his identifying panther skin, adorned with animal heads, over a short tunic—a chiton—and high-laced sandals. Tucked under his arm is a smaller female figure, whose archaistic pose and dress imitate those of Greek statues carved two centuries earlier.
Emily Sachar is a graduate student in art history at the City University of New York and is the author of Shut Up and Let the Lady Teach (Simon & Schuster).