Antiquities Exhibits

This finial, which originally decorated the top of a tall candelabrum, is an excellent example of Early Classical sculpture. A bearded warrior wearing a full panoply of armor assists his younger, beardless comrade, who has sustained a wound to his left leg or foot and is supported by the spear he once held in his right hand and by his friend's shoulder. - Metropolitan Museum of Art. Etruscan culture was influenced by ancient Greek culture, beginning around 750 BCE, during the last phase of the Villanovan period, when the Greeks, who were at this time in their Archaic Orientalizing period, started founding colonies in southern Italy.  It continued during the Classical period from the 5th to the 4th centuries BCE, even though the political balance of power in the region began to shift to the rising Roman Republic after 500 BCE. The bearded warrior depicted in this sculpture wears a Greek Corinthian-style helmet tipped back on his head.  This practice gave rise to a series of var...

Ancient artifacts recovered around the Mediterranean at the Museum of Mediterranean Archaeology in Marseille, France. Museum of Mediterranean Archaeology in Marseille houses the most important ensemble of Egyptian art in France after the Louvre.  Their Egyptian collections offer a thematic presentation of daily life, cults and funerary rites from prehistory to the second century CE. The classical collections offer a geographical and chronological discovery of the Middle East, with Assyrian coins and objects from Nineveh, Greece, Rome, Cyprus, Etruria and Gaul, from the fourth millennium to the third century CE including  Cycladic vases, a remarkable Minoan oenochoe (fifteenth century BCE), Corinthian perfume vases decorated with animal or floral prints, ceramics, a black figure vessel with a red face , a kouros, and Etruscan and Roman bucchero ware, bronze objects, children's toys, a Venus marble, and glassware. Image: Doll in a sitting position, articulated arms. Fema...