Antiquities Exhibits

Unlike lions, leopards, and bears, tigers appear relatively rarely in Roman art, with the tigress seen more frequently than her male counterpart. - Cleveland Art Museum Apparently, the emperor Titus was the first ruler to introduce tigers to the crowds in the Flavian Amphitheater (Colosseum), among the 9,000 beasts killed over the course of its 100 day inauguration. I found a reference to the book "Rome beyond the Empire" by Mortimer Wheeler published in 1954 that describes Roman trading posts around the coast of India and how a Greek merchant sailed as far as the Bay of Bengal about 60 CE. Perhaps he established some trading relationships that resulted in the acquisition of those tigers. "The Scriptores Historiae Augustae explicitly praised the emperor Antonius Pius for his munificence in staging a games featuring ‘all the animals of the whole earth,’ and it seems such claims were scarcely an exaggeration: lions, rhinos, crocodiles, hippos, cheetahs, rhinoceroses, monke...

Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Pre-Columbian art at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. Founded in 1933, this American museum offers a diverse display of ancient art, nestled within its total collection of 30,000 objects. The Chrysler's collection of Mesoamerican ceramics and sculptures represent several major pre-Columbian cultures. Citizens and heroes of ancient Greece and Rome endure through works of art created in  bronze, stone, and ceramics. Ancient Egypt is represented by displays of jewelry, ceramics, funerary art, and sculpture while the museum's Asian collection include objects from Japan, India, and China, with ceramics representing every major Chinese dynasty. Image: Basalt Head from Egypt's Greco-Roman period 200-400 CE courtesy of the Chrysler Museum of Art.

Crystal: Visible and Invisible.”   October 12, 2019 to January 6, 2020 at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.  Bracelet of rock crystal with gold rams heads Greek part of the Ganymede Jewelry collection 330-300 BCE photographed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Today, high quality quartz crystals are mined from the mountains and caverns of Arkansas. Yet this iridescent, enigmatic material has captivated artists, religious leaders, monarchs, and healers across the world for more than 6,000 years. View ancient artifacts like the one below, including engraved gems, skulls, figurines, vases, and more, alongside works from contemporary artists around the world that explore the power of crystal in art by drawing on its form, properties, and mysterious qualities. Featuring more than 75 works from Ancient Egypt and Greece, through to Rome, China, India, Japan, the Middle East, the Americas, and beyond, discover how the power of crystal tr...