365 Days at the Met

April 30, 2018 Gallery 160 has a relatively small number of works from the Hellenistic period and is dominated by a portion of a huge column taken from the temple of Artemis at Sardis. The column, with its Ionic capital, was originally about 60 feet tall; the fragment in the museum, while less than a third that size, is still imposing. There are also some large kraters for mixing wine and water and ceremonial vessels for holding water that come from Puglia, a reminder of southern Italy's Greek past. I wish we were going to Paestum or Segesta on our upcoming trip; Agrigento will have to suffice. I realize that I need to revise my impression of Hellenistic art as highly emotionally expressive. Some is, some isn't. I see a lot of continuity with the classical tradition, with its emphasis on idealized forms and emotional reserve. I also can't help but contrast the relatively brief efflorescence of Greek art (a few hundred years) with the millennia spanned by Egyp...

April 26, 2018 With Gallery 159, it's back to vases, lots of them, all red-figured and most if not all from the 5th century B.C.E. A little time away has been restorative, and I am able to admire the fineness of the work - especially when I put my reading glasses on. I plan to write about one of the first works I see, which I immediately recognize as Thetis giving the new armor to her son, Achilles. Maybe I want to write about it just because I do recognize it. But then I see a small black oil jar, only about 5 inches high, that charms me no end. On the body, it depicts a woman in profile. She is nude excpt for a headband and a garter around her thigh; her torso is very slim, but her arms and thighs and breasts are well developed, her pubic hair just suggested. She is bending over to pick up (or perhaps put down) a garment that is partly draped over the back of a cushioned chair facing her. The caption explains that the object beside her on the floor is a vase for holdi...

April 25, 2018 Gallery 158, with objects largely from the 4th century B.C.E.,  is blessedly free (almost) of painted vases. (I was chagrined when Janet Mindes asked me the other day whether I prefer black-figure or red-figure vases, adding that they are really very different, and I didn't have an answer for her.) Instead, there are many marble statues and steles that served as grave markers; some wonderfully elaborate  gold earrings, including a pair depicting what I took to be a boy riding a dolohin but really showing a cupid-figure riding a dove (oh well, I didn't get that close a look at them); and slver objects, including one that looks for all the world like a strainer -- and is! (But what a strainer- was it actually put to household use or employed mainly in rituals, I wonder?)  I'm tempted to write about. a small terracotta statuette of two girls playing a game in which one rides piggyback, her left foot lifted above the ground, simply because it is so pl...

April 19, 2018 Gallery 157 is yet another gallery with dozens of kylixes (drinking cups), amphoras (jars), kraters (vessels for mixing water and wine), and other kinds of ceramics. The ones I like best are, for the most part, ones that "break the mold" in form or design. There's a wonderful cup shaped like a cow's hoof, on the exterior of which are painted a cowherd and his dog keeping watch over the cattle. Another cup is in the form of a black man's head; the cup is mostly black, but a red glaze makes his curly hair and lips really stand out, although almost as a caricature, by our standards. (Apparently, black people were known to the Greeks from Homeric times on.) There are a few more conventionally-shaped ceramics I like for their unusual subjects. One shows a man and a woman reclining on a long couch. It's a welcome change from so many scenes of Greeks fighting Amazons, satyrs pursuing women, and so on. Today's object is  a krater about 2...

April 18, 2018 This galley (156) also contains a large number of vases, along with marble statues, bronze statuettes, and other objects, mostly from the 5th century B.C.E. I pat myself on the back for immediately recognizing a depiction of Hermes, with his winged sandals and traveler's hat, but am quickly put in my place when the figure I think is Athena turns out to be Apollo. Oh well.... I admire the vases, but I don't for the most part love them, and I'm trying to figure out why. Partly it may be the subject matter, which often depicts violence -- fights between warriors, violence towards women. (Poseidon was quite the lech, I learn.) But it's also that most of them  don't evoke much feeling of any kind in me. This isn't true of today's object, a marble funerary stele some 3 feet high from about 450-400 B.C.E.  Carved in relief against a plain ground, it shows in profile a little girl who is holding to her chest a pet dove, which is crooked ag...

April 12, 2018 This gallery (155) contains literally dozens of 6th century B.C.E. ceramics, and after a certain point, I find it hard to pay close attention to them any more. I do recognize a number of motifs: Theseus killing the Minotaur (who looks more human than I'd expected); the judgment of Paris (though I can't tell from their depictions which goddess is which); fighting warriors; Dionysus, etc.  I'm intrigued by the presence of "eye-vases" in which the principal scene is framed on either side by a large round eye. Apparently, these eyes were meant to ward off evil; they call to mind the beads painted to resemble eyes on my Turkish keychain, which presumably serve the same function 2500 years later. (I wonder: Does the much older Eye of Horus have the same significance?  But I look it up and see that the Eye of Horus is a symbol of royal power, protection, and health. Similar, but not really the same.)  The gallery has a  number of bronze pieces a...

April 11, 2018 This gallery (154) focuses on Greek art of the 6th century B.C.E. and mostly contains marble sculptures that served as grave markers, along with terracotta vessels of various sizes and shapes. The latter are helpfully arranged by theme, including warfare and athletics, the symposium, and mourning and the afterlife. I hadn't previously realized how closely athletic training was associated with military preparation in the Greek worldview. Through athletics, youths developed the discipline needed to be effective hoplites, or foot soldiers, who moved together in close formation. But today's object doesn't reflect any of these themes. It calls to mind my experience as a schoolgirl in Italy, where I was expected, like my peers, to memorize the  Iliad. I was pretty quickly exempted from this task on the grounds that learning Italian through an 18th-century translation would only confound my efforts to learn the Italian of the mid-20th century - as indeed i...

April 9, 2018 This long, high-ceilinged, skylit gallery (153) is intended to show the glory of Greek classical art. It largely houses Greek terracotta vases and Roman copies in marble of Greek bronze statues. The vases (really, I suppose, kraters and amphoras) date from 550-400 B.C.E. and often depict athletic contests, such as wrestling and foot races. I find the display unsatisfying, because the vases are painted on both sides, but the display cases are so close to the walls that it's nearly impossible to see what's on the reverse side of most of them. The original bronze statues date from about 500 B.C.E and the marble copies from about 100 B.C.E. to 300 C.E. I feel incredibly lucky to have seen the exhibit of bronze statues at the National Gallery a couple of years ago, because these statues are so rare, many of them having been melted down over the centuries to forge armaments.  Fortunately, the Romans took molds from the bronzes to make plaster casts that could ...

April 6, 2018 Gallery 152 focuses on objects, largely of bronze and terracotta, associated with the Greek expansion both  into Asia Minor and into the Mediterranean, including Sicily and the Italian mainland.  The captions discuss the fact that the Greeks incorporated design elements from these places, including both naturalistic depictions of animals and supernatural beings like sphinxes and griffins.  In fact, some of the small glass perfume bottles look like those from Egypt, but less refined. I have some inchoate thoughts about the value of absorbing aspects of other cultures that seem relevant at a time when various nationalisms seem on the ascendant, but these thoughts will remain undeveloped, at least for now. Today's object is a terracotta drinking cup whose main body is perhaps 4 inches high. It  dates from about 575-550  B.C.E. and shows dancing men in a procession, painted in black against a beige ground. But whereas the Egyptian wal...

April 5, 2018 T he objects in this galley (151) cover a very long time span, from the late Neolithic (ca. 5000-3500 B.C.E.) through the Geometric period (1000-700 B.C.E.). A couple of features of Cycladic art (produced in the Cyclades islands in the Aegean, largely between 3200 and 2000 B.C.E. ) strike me.  First is the substantial number of marble statuettes of nude women, presumably fertility figures. It's a reminder of just how important fertility was (perhaps particularly at a time when many children died at birth or at an early age), as well as how it appears to have been uniquely associated with women. Of course, pregnancy was a very visible sign of fertility; but when, I wonder, did the idea that men could be infertile first take hold? Second is the depiction of the human head- long, oval, and virtually featureless except for the protruding long, narrow noses, shaped like triangular wedges. Very Brancusian, I'd say! I have to believe that Brancusi  was influ...

April 2, 2018 This introductory gallery (150) displays only seven objects, but they are a highly select sample of Greek art from the Neolithic to the Hellenistic period. The first object I see is a  female fertility figure with enormous buttocks dating from 4800-4400 B.C.E.- far older than anything I saw in the Egyptian wing. I learn that large kraters were, until about the 7th century B.C. E., used as grave markers and often included depictions of the stretched-out body of the deceased. This makes me realize that funerary rituals were a wellspring for art in many parts of the ancient world, not just Egypt. But did the Greeks gain inspiration from the Egyptians in some measure?  Today's object is totally arresting - a 2 1/2 feet high fragment of a monumental marble head of a young man from the 2nd century B.C.E. found at Pergamon and on loan to the Met from the Staatliche Museum in Berlin. I hope it's a long-term loan, because the head is magnificent. What a dreamboa...

When I dreamt up this project sometime last year, I had no idea that there are 37 galleries in the Egyptian wing, and perhaps that is a good thing; I might have felt less committed to the enterprise. But I can honestly say that in every gallery I have found things that surprised or fascinated or maybe just pleased me, and I could never have imagined how important and meaningful this effort has become to me. Egyptian art is a fitting place to begin a project that marks the beginning of the last phase of my life.  I hope, of course, that that phase will be a long and happy and rewarding one, but there is no way to know that.  But it will ultimately come to an end, so it is appropriate to start with a culture whose art reveals a preoccupation with death and the afterlife.   It's also a good starting point because it's a topic I knew a bit about, having traveled in Egypt and done some prep work before that trip. But I've quickly come to realize that there is far, far ...