Eclectic Antiquity Catalog
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Eclectic Antiquity the Classical Collection of the Snite Museum of Art Compiled and edited by Robin F. Rhodes Eclectic Antiquity the Classical Collection of the Snite Museum of Art Compiled and edited by Robin F. Rhodes © University of Notre Dame, 2010. All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-0-9753984-2-5 Table of Contents Introduction..................................................................................................................................... 1 Geometric Horse Figurine ............................................................................................................. 5 Horse Bit with Sphinx Cheek Plates.............................................................................................. 11 Cup-skyphos with Women Harvesting Fruit.................................................................................. 17 Terracotta Lekythos....................................................................................................................... 23 Marble Lekythos Gravemarker Depicting “Leave Taking” ......................................................... 29 South Daunian Funnel Krater....................................................................................................... 35 Female Figurines.......................................................................................................................... 41 Hooded Male Portrait................................................................................................................... 47 Small Female Head....................................................................................................................... 53 Zeus Enthroned.............................................................................................................................. 59 Pair of Marble Feet....................................................................................................................... 65 Pair of Colossal Hands................................................................................................................. 71 Glass Bottles.................................................................................................................................. 77 Bifacial Unguentarium.................................................................................................................. 83 Head of a Young Man.................................................................................................................... 89 Palmette Antefixes......................................................................................................................... 95 Mercury-Thoth............................................................................................................................ 103 Head of Roman Matron............................................................................................................... 109 Panther Protome from Tripod Table........................................................................................... 115 Silenus......................................................................................................................................... 121 Architectural Fragments............................................................................................................. 127 Painted Bust of a Youth............................................................................................................... 133 Head of Roman Matron............................................................................................................... 139 Head of Youth.............................................................................................................................. 143 Lion Head Spout.......................................................................................................................... 147 Acanthus Medallion with Human Head...................................................................................... 151 Funerary Bust of Roman Cavalryman........................................................................................ 155 Panther Chariot Attachment....................................................................................................... 161 Theater Mask............................................................................................................................... 167 Coptic Funerary Stele.................................................................................................................. 173 Forgery of Roman Wall Painting Fragment with Gorgoneion....................................................179 Appendix...................................................................................................................................... 183 Introduction In 2004 Keith Bradley, chair of the Classics Department, spoke to me about undertaking the publication of a catalog of the classical collection of the Snite Museum of Art at Notre Dame. We agreed that a catalog would make the collection more accessible to students and to the general public, and that such a publication could serve as another tool for making the classics more central to the university and community experience of Notre Dame and South Bend. He then went on to procure from the Dean’s office of the College of Arts and Letters at Notre Dame the necessary funds for research of the objects and so set the wheels of this project in motion. The publication itself has been made possible by the following offices of the University of Notre Dame: the Henkels Lecture Series and the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, the Department of Classics, and the Patrons of the Snite Museum of Art. The assemblage of classical art in the Snite Museum is not the result of a conscious strategy of collecting; instead, for the most part, it represents the unrelated gifts of various donors over the years. Thus the collection has grown eclectically and is somewhat random in its nature and quality; and it is small. It does not include the kind of celebrity pieces that demand purple-draped rooms with spotlights and champagne flutes. Yet the range of the collection is broad, both chronologically and geographically. From a charming little bronze horse of the Greek Geometric period to the marble fragments of a colossal Roman divinity, from a Luristan horse bit to a Roman table leg, from a fifth-century-BCE scene of Greek women harvesting fruit on a black-figured drinking cup to Late Antique funerary monuments of the Roman Near East, from stone and terracotta fragments of architectural moldings and sculpture to a painted funerary portrait from Roman Egypt, from various other portraits of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan public and private individuals to everyday vessels of glass and clay, the classical collection of the Snite 1 Museum encompasses countless artistic and cultural themes of sculpture, painting, architecture, religion, politics, society, and commerce. Strategically presented, it can provide an informative and fascinating overview of the classical world. Most of the classical objects in the Snite collection are illustrated with catalog entries here; the rest are listed at the end of the catalog and will be included as entries in the next edition. The organization is chronological and, with the exception of a single Luristan bronze that illustrates and clarifies important aspects of early Greek art, all of the objects are from the Greco-Roman world. In the spirit of reaching the greater Notre Dame and South Bend community, the goal of these catalog entries is not only to present basic descriptions and vital statistics but also to use each object as a tool for engaging Museum visitors in the contemplation and appreciation of classical art, and as a key to examining one or more aspects of classical culture and contemporary scholarship. This is a teaching catalog, and it has been left to the initiative, creativity, and didactic goals of each of the contributors to choose and develop one or more issues or themes raised by each object. Most of these objects are presently in storage, but it is our hope that the publication of this catalog will help facilitate their further incorporation into the Museum’s permanent exhibition, perhaps even as a separate display of classical art. The ancestry of the catalog lies in an earlier project begun under my direction in 1998–99 by Carrie Tovar, then a Notre Dame Art History M.A. candidate and now a Curatorial Assistant at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu. At that point none of the objects in the classical collection had even been inventoried, and over the course of the project Tovar completed basic records for approximately one third of the objects. Wherever such a record exists, it has served as a valuable reference in the research for the catalog entries presented here. Special thanks are due to Ann Knoll, the Associate Director of the Snite Museum, for her gracious and dependable attention to me and to the contributors as they visited the Museum to 2 study the objects. I am also grateful to the Museum staff members who made objects accessible for study by lifting heavy display cases and to the security staff who sat patiently with the contributors as they studied in the storerooms and exhibition hall. In addition, I express my gratitude to Christopher Stackowicz for serving as artistic director and graphic designer for this project. Under my direction he also photographed the objects for the catalog and prepared the images for