MUSE, Volume 42, 2008
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2008 MVSE VOLUME FORTY- TWO 2008 Annual of the Museum of Art and Archaeology University of Missouri MVSE VOLUME FORTY-TWO 2008 Annual of the Museum of Art and Archaeology University of Missouri I Pickard Hall Columbia, MO 65211 Telephone: (573) 882-3591 Website: http://maa.missouri.edu Jane Biers editor Jeffrey Wilcox assistant editor Nicole Eaton editorial assistant Stephanie Lyons graphic design © 2009 by the Curators of the University of Missouri ISSN 0077-2194 ISBN 0-910501-39-4 The Museum of Art and Archaeology is open from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and from noon to 4:00 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Admission is free. The museum is closed on Mondays, from December 25 through January I, and on University of Missouri holidays : Martin Luther King Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day, and the Friday following. Guided tours are available, if sc heduled two weeks in advance. The Museum Store is open from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and from noon to 4:00 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Back numbers of Muse are available from the Museum of Art and Archaeology. All submitted manuscripts are reviewed. Front cover: Female head, perhaps Demeter or Persephone Greek, South Italy, probably Taranto, fourth century B.C.E. Terracotta, H. I 6.8 cm Weinberg Fund (acc. no. 2008. 169) Back cover: Statuette of a seared transcendental Buddha, probably Amirayus or Amitabha Probably Tibet, Qing dynasty, Qianlong reign, 1770 Gilt bronze with traces of paint, H. 18.5 cm Gifi: ofWilliam A. Scott (acc. no. 2008.180) 2 Eugene Numa Lane 1936-2007 Kt av TITWXLK~ TT]V ~pw;, T] 10etKT] 0£ CT£ yD1.aCT£. 'fam aocp6c; nou eytv£c;, µ£ TOCTTJ n£ipa, ~OT] ea w KUTUAa~£<; OL 10aK£<; n oriµa[vouv. And if you find her poor, Ithaka will not have deceived you. You will have become so wise, with so much experience, That you will understand then what the lthakas mean. -Constantine P. Cavafy, Ithaka Eugene Numa Lane was born on August 13, 1936, in Washington, D.C., and received his B.A. from Princeton University in 1958, his M.A. from Yale University in 1960, and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1962. He was Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, from 1962 until 1966 and moved to the University of Missouri at Columbia, where he served as Associate Professor and then Professor of Classical 3 Studies. He became Professor Emeritus in March of 2000. Gene taught a wide variety of courses throughout his career, ranging from small seminars for upper-level and graduate students to lectures in Classical Mythology for up to 400 students. Most of the courses were language courses, usually in Ancient Greek, a few in Latin; the civilization courses were in English. Gene's connection to the Museum of Art and Archaeology was a close one. He demonstrated a true appreciation of its collection and encouraged students to visit and study the artifacts. He was instrumental in the selection and purchase of coins, statues, and other objects connected with the cults of Men and Sabazios. (His multivolume publications in the Brill Etudes preliminaires aux religions orientales dans /'empire romain series are achievements that continue to be of tremendous value to all researchers on these cults.) Finally, he was a frequent contributor to Muse, and we respectfully dedicate this volume to him and his scholarship, which has advanced our knowledge and understanding of the ancient world. Cathy Callaway Associate Museum Educator 4 Table of Contents Eugene Numa Lane Cathy Callaway 3 Director's Report Alex W. Barker 7 A Funerary Deposit from Early Bronze Age Cyprus Jennifer M. Webb and David Frankel 15 A Bronze Septimius Severus at Saitta, Issued by Charikles An Avatar or Acolyte for the Moon-God Men? In Memory of Eugene Numa Lane Patricia Lawrence 31 Albrecht Diirer's Curls Melchior Lorck's 1550 Engraved Portrait and Its Relationship to Diirer's Self-Fashioned Public Image Joan Stack 43 About the Authors 77 Acquisitions 2008 79 Exhibitions 2008 89 Loans to Other Institutions 2008 94 Museum Activities 2008 95 Staff 2008 103 Docents 2008 105 Museum Advisory Council of Students (MACS) 2008 106 Advisory Committee 2008 107 Director's Report Over the course of 2008, the museum mounted three major and several smaller exhibitions. The year began with Before Columbus: Iconography in the Ancient Americas, an exhibition I curated examining how meanings were constructed in ancient societies and are reconstructed from Precolumbian objects. Visitors were surveyed to assess the effectiveness of the exhibition in conveying the intended take-home messages; 45 percent of visitors indicated that the exhibition had strongly changed (five of five possible Likert Scale points) their understanding of iconography and the ways that images convey meanings, and 41 percent strongly felt it had changed and advanced their perceptions of art. More general impressions of the exhibition were also instructive: 76 percent indicated that the exhibition had exceeded their expectations, and 99 percent would recommend the exhibition to others. The exhibition also attracted new audiences to the museum; only 15 percent indicated they were regular museum visitors. During the summer, the museum presented The Poetry of Nature in Japanese Woodblock Prints, the first Museum of Art and Archaeology major exhibition curated by Dr. Mary Pixley. The exhibition examined both the natural and seasonal referents encoded in Japanese woodblock prints, as well as the complexities of the woodblock process itself. While the intellectual quality of the exhibition was high, what was perhaps most striking was the aesthetic quality of the exhibition as a whole, both in terms of the individual works selected for display and the overall design and installation of the exhibition, reflecting the synergy of Pixley and Museum of Art and Archaeology Chief Preparator Barbara Smith. Through a skillful combination of standardized spacing, matting, mounting, color choice, and lighting, the physical installation of the exhibition recapitulated the serenity and simplicity of line characteristic of woodblock prints. The autumn exhibition, Missouri through Lens and Palette, reflected a collaboration between the Museum of Art and Archaeology and the Missouri Photo Workshop, which has documented daily life in towns across Missouri through photographic essays for more than sixty years. Commemorating the centennial of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, the exhibition juxtaposed outstanding photographic images from the Missouri Photo Workshop with painted works from the museum's permanent collections, supplemented by loans from anonymous private collectors and from the university's Scruggs-Vandervoort-Barney Collection, which the museum has helped curate and conserve for many years. The exhibition explored how quite different kinds of images can be used to establish and develop a sense of place and compared the ways that elements like composition and lighting are used in photojournalism and the visual arts. The opening of the exhibition coincided with the opening of the university's new Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI), and Barbara Smith designed and constructed special vitrines that echoed the architectural details of the new RJI building. When the exhibition closed, the museum offered these vitrines to the RJI to help the institute continue to interpret the Missouri Photo Workshop's legacy to visitors. The museum also presented a series of smaller temporary exhibitions, including Satirizing the High Life: Hogarth's Marriage a la Mode, which presented the museum's 7 DIRECTOR'S REPORT newly acquired set of Hogarth prints, and Dreams of the Surreal, which examined surrealist art using a combination of two- and three-dimensional works. Other temporary exhibitions in 2008 included The Fine Art of Living: Luxury Objects from the East and West, Daumier's Paris: Life in the Nineteenth-Century City, and an offsite exhibition of photographs from the Songs of My People series at the university's Ellis Library. The museum also reinstalled a display of ancient glass, highlighting the research focus of Dr. Gladys Weinberg, one of the museum's founders. During 2008, the exhibition Work Is Art and Art Is Work: The Art of Hand-Crafted Instruments traveled across the state. This NEA-supported exhibition, created by the Missouri Folk Arts Program, showcased traditional Missouri luthiers. Also in 2008, the Board of Curators of the University of Missouri recognized the museum for its continuing achievements through a special resolution of permanence and value, passed unanimously at their meeting on April 4, 2008. It specifically recognized the unique character and role of the museum as a valued, integral, and lasting part of the university. The Museum of Art and Archaeology continues to expand its collections across diverse areas. In 2008, our Asian collections grew through a generous gift of works, mainly statuettes, from Mr. William A. Scott. These included works from East Asia (2), Central Asia (9), South Asia (5) and Southeast Asia (4); in addition to these objects, Mr. Scott also donated a fifteenth-century Italian manuscript page to the museum's manuscript collection. We are deeply grateful to Mr. Scott for his continuing support of the museum and its mission. Dr. and Mrs. Arthur F. Furman presented the museum with a painting by Bulgarian-born American artist Stephen Sacklarian, as well as a marvelous 2007 porcelain by Jennifer McCurdy. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Mr. William A. Scott. selected the Museum of Art and Archaeology to receive more than 150 Warhol photographs, including approximately 100 of Warhol's signature polaroids and about fifty silver gelatin prints. Also, Museum Associates, Inc., gave the museum an exquisite set of prints of William Hogarth's 1745 Marriage a la Mode.