Antiquities Exhibits

The Villa Giulia Painter decorated vases in Athens during the period from about 470 to 440 B.C. He worked primarily in the red-figure technique, but he also produced some white-ground pieces. Most of his work appears to have been on large vessels, especially kraters of various forms. The Villa Giulia Painter usually favored quiet scenes, but he also included many depictions of Dionysiac religion and unusual myths. As with most ancient artists, the real name of the Villa Giulia Painter is unknown, and he is identified only by the stylistic traits of his work. Scholars named him after a krater in the Villa Giulia Museum in Rome. - Getty Museum According to classicist John Beazley, The Villa Giulia Painter's work was representative of the "academic wing of early classic vase-painting”, whose best works are distinguished by “a quiet nobility.”  Some of his work also includes a kalos or "love name" applied near a depicted character. Vase painters commonly added these term...

Hecate or Hekate is a goddess in ancient Greek religion and mythology, most often shown holding a pair of torches or a key. In later periods she is often depicted in triple form. She is variously associated with crossroads, entrance-ways, night, light, magic, witchcraft, knowledge of herbs and poisonous plants, ghosts, necromancy, and sorcery. Her earliest appearance in literature was in Hesiod's Theogony in the late 8th century BCE as a goddess of great honor with domains in sky, earth, and sea. Her place of origin is debated by scholars, but she had popular followings amongst the witches of Thessaly and an important sanctuary among the Carians of Asia Minor in Lagina.  Hecate was one of several deities worshiped in ancient Athens as a protector of the oikos (household), alongside Zeus, Hestia, Hermes, and Apollo.  Some scholars have suggested Hecate was originally considered an aspect of Artemis prior to the latter's adoption into the Olympian pantheon. Artemis would have, a...

The social structure in Aegyptus under the Romans was both unique and complicated. On the one hand, the Romans continued to use many of the same organizational tactics that were in place under the leaders of the Ptolemaic period. At the same time, the Romans saw the Greeks in Aegyptus as “Egyptians”, an idea that both the native Egyptians and Greeks would have rejected. To further compound the whole situation, Jews, who themselves were very Hellenized overall, had their own communities, separate from both Greeks and native Egyptians. The Romans began a system of social hierarchy that revolved around ethnicity and place of residence. The Augustan takeover introduced a system of compulsory public service, which was based on poros (property or income qualification), which was wholly based on social status and power. Other than Roman citizens, a Greek citizen of one of the Greek cities had the highest status, and a rural Egyptian would be in the lowest class. In between those classes was t...

 Plaques in the form of a bust were sometimes placed in tombs of women in ancient Greece as token representations of ideal and perpetual maidenhood.  The female is sometimes depicted wearing a crown (polos) possibly alluding to tragic virgins of myth such as Persephone, the daughter of Zeus and Demeter who became the queen of the underworld through her abduction by Hades, the god of the underworld.  Persephone and her mother Demeter were the central figures of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which promised the initiated a more enjoyable prospect after death. Image: Painted Terracotta Tomb plaque made in Boeotia about 420-390 BCE that I photographed at the British Museum in 2016.

“From Homer’s World: Tenos and the Cyclades in the Mycenaean Age” now open at the new Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece. A total of 151 artifacts including finds from the Mycenaean tholos tomb at Agia Thekla excavated by Georgios Despinis in 1979. The burial place of an aristocratic clan, the tomb of Aghia Thekla (13th-12th century BCE) was used for multiple burials. Other finds on display include prehistoric sites from the islands of Naxos, Delos, Paros, Milos, Sifnos and Kea. Among these, is the “Kyra of Fylakopi” (approximately mid-14th century BCE), one of the masterpieces of Mycenaean figurine sculpture found at the sanctuary of Fylakopi on the island of Milos. Image: Mycenaean warrior wearing the distinctive boar's tusk helmet, Ivory. Image courtesy of Eurokinissi. https://www.thenationalherald.com/273856/archaeological-exhibition-on-the-myceanean-era-cyclades-islands-to-ppen-in-athens/

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...

Ancient Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia. VMFA’s collection of ancient Mediterranean art is one of the largest on the East Coast, spanning more than 5,000 years of human history, from Pre-Dynastic Egypt in the 4th millennium BC through the fall of the Byzantine Empire in AD 1453. The collection includes objects from Egypt, the Near East, the Aegean, Greece, Etruria, the Roman Empire, and Byzantium. Image: Votive offering depicting Ulysses (Odysseus) bound to the mast of his ship Byzantine 5th-6th century CE Bronze with traces of gilding. Image courtesy of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Treasures of Ancient Greece. Opening June 15, 2019 at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis in Indianapolis, Indiana. Diskobolos (discus thrower) 2nd century CE Roman copy of 450-440 BCE Greek bronze by Myron recovered from Emperor Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli Italy. Photographed at "The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece" exhibit assembled by the British Museum and displayed at the Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon. Rare antiquities from Greece including mythological gods and goddesses, a replica of the Antikythera mechanism and fine art will be part of a new exhibit at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis opening June 15, 2019 called Treasures of Ancient Greece. A separate exhibit called Take Me There: Greece will focus o n the people, culture, environment, homes and markets of modern Greece.