The beautifully refurbished Behrakis galleries give a jolt to the museum’s vast antiquities collection.
When a museum totally overhauls its permanent collection galleries, curators and directors call it a “reinstallation.” The term’s too modest and too technical.
“Reinstallation” suggests putting the air conditioners back in the windows in time for summer or, if you can find one, hiring a plumber. A reinstallation of the kind that the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has just opened, displaying its Greek and Roman art, isn’t a remodel or a decorating project, though. The museum has opened a new school for teaching the culture of Greece and Rome through art. It’s an extraordinary conceptual project and a big construction job, too.
The new Behrakis galleries display more than 500 objects in a huge and impressive 15,000-square-foot setting. There’s the largest Roman sculpture in America, a first-century a.d. colossal Juno, Jupiter’s goddess consort and the original angry wife wielding a rolling pin. She’s 14 feet tall and weighs 13,000 pounds. Jupiter’s ball and chain reigns in a gallery of mostly sculpture built and arranged to evoke an old temple. There’s sculpture we could hold in our hands, too, part decorative and part lucky charm. Vases, coins, jewelry, armor, mosaics, glass, medical instruments, and some painting, along with marble, bronze, and ceramic sculpture, make for a massive puzzle.
I’ve never written about reinstallation since they’re so vast an enterprise. I spent two afternoons in the Behrakis galleries. I look for clarity, intellectual heft, objects of notable majesty and beauty. Visitors will certainly find all of these. Both scholars and the generalist art lover will feel they’ve struck gold, and catering to both simultaneously is an Olympian task. The MFA is Boston’s — and New England’s — anchor civic museum, and its antiquities collection is, with the Met’s, the best in the country.
Though they’ve been gone for a while, I remember the old antiquities galleries. Most of the objects in the new Behrakis galleries used to be there. It was old-fashioned in a few ways. The cases were old. The labels weren’t exactly helpful either because they were mute on content or packed with content aimed at specialists. Conveying how Greeks and Romans used objects to live wasn’t remotely a goal. The art seemed pickled and the stuff of books and classrooms.
The new galleries give the art a jolt. Ancient culture becomes personal. As much as we can, more than 2,000 years after the fact, we see everyday life. We also see art in a refreshed, bold setting, with good lighting, down-to-earth interpretation, and new cases. The evolution of self-awareness is so important in Greek culture. The art’s arranged to give self-awareness a visual form. Religious faith, the body, creating wealth, discovery and adventure, and human aspiration give flesh and blood to clay, marble, and metal. The old stuff, now refreshed, resonates. We see more of ourselves, as we should. Greek and Roman culture is our heritage.
From the MFA’s grand staircase, through the rotunda decorated with the great John Singer Sargent murals, the galleries have multiple entrances. Not exactly labyrinthine but, yes, one or two drop the visitor in the middle of the conversation. I picked the right one, signaled by a big bust of Zeus. Tranquil, grave, and inscrutable, this over-life-size marble head from around 350 b.c. is Zeus the paterfamilias, but one more like Don Corleone than “Father Knows Best.”
This first gallery — the mega-Juno is at the other end — introduces us to the gods as a concept and to recurring heavy hitters such as Athena, Apollo, Aphrodite, Hermes, and Ares. The gods aren’t like the divinities from, say, Christianity. In an old movie, a hat-check girl gushed, “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds,” to which Mae West replied, “Goodness had nothing to do with it.” The gods aren’t beacon lights of goodness. They’re larger-than-life teases, tarts, brutes, and sybarites. Masters and mistresses of mischief, they trick and taunt one another but mostly hapless humanity. They’re not into salvation. All the dead go to Hades, an accommodation that doesn’t discriminate between good and bad. That said, the gods demand to be worshipped. Sunny or dark, delivering delight or woe, the gods instigate or explain much of what happens to mere mortals.
This gallery was very effective on all counts. It’s constructed like a Greek temple, a rectangular box lined with sculptures of gods and serving to introduce them to us by name and job description but also by iconography and aesthetics. There’s a section on the many forms of Aphrodite, the goddess associated with love, lust, and procreation but not the tedium of motherhood or child-rearing. That’s Leto, also the goddess of modesty. Small figures of doves and swans cue that we’re looking at Aphrodite. She’s sometimes paired with Eros, her “enfant terrible” and agent. We know the voluptuous nude Torso of Aphrodite as the original sex goddess by her straightforward nudity. It’s Roman and from the second century a.d. She doesn’t need a calling card.
From the “who, what, where, why,” the gallery teaches us about Greek and Roman aesthetics. The Torso of Aphrodite is the perfect nude female, but drapery styles help us not only date sculpture but assess craftsmanship. The wet-drapery style of Cybele, dating to the second century a.d., suggests belly, breasts, and knees through cascades of fabric looking thick and bunched here and there but taut and transparent where it needs to be.
Athena Parthenos is a Roman marble replica of the giant gold and ivory sculpture of Athena that stood within the Parthenon in Athens. Designed, we think, by Phidias and unveiled in 438 b.c., this original was endlessly copied in clay and marble over hundreds of years.
The MFA version is detailed and refined, with the Sphinx helmet flanked by winged horses that the ivory and gold sculpture is thought to have had, as well as the elaborately carved coiled snakes surrounding the goddess’s magic shield. This object introduces us to the theme of copies. The Romans were expert, gleeful plagiarists, so they had no problem copying Greek forms or tweaking them as the Greek gods transitioned to their Roman counterparts. The gallery tells us about condition. Athena Parthenos would have had arms, of course, and these would have held a small sculpture of Nike, a symbol of victory, in one hand and a spear in the other.
Athena Parthenos also asks us to reimagine our understanding of the aesthetics of Greek and Roman sculpture. These objects are 2,000 or more years old. In the day, they were not only not armless or headless. They weren’t white. This is old news for art historians, but these sculptures were originally painted to look real, or to look like a Technicolor version of real. A nifty video shows what Athena Parthenos probably looked like, which is Carmen Miranda. She would have been outfitted with bronze ornaments, too. A sculpture of a god set outside in the sun would have glittered.
Inside or out, lifelike yet impassive and remote, sculptures of the gods would have put the “awe” in awesome. Of course, over time, with invasions, plunder, earthquakes, burial among rubble, what we’d call extreme wear and tear, color and appendages disappear or degrade. For color, conservators are guided by traces of pigment still surviving.
Every exhibition has its odd, chalkboard-screeching moments. “Greek and Roman sculptures have long been associated with whiteness,” we read. “Here it comes,” I thought, cringing. “Sadly,” the wall text reads, “some white nationalist groups have exploited the appearance of these sculptures today to support their claims that the Greeks and Romans were themselves white, a racial concept that did not exist in antiquity.” Since Greek and Roman sculptures are seen to express ideal beauty, we’re told, white nationalists see their whiteness as a token of racial superiority.
What’s this have to do with the price of ouzo? The answer is “nothing.” It’s the only race-baiting moment in the galleries, and I think I read every label.
Let’s get real. No dumb-ass Confederate-flag-waving yahoo in the hollers is going to look at, say, the Aphrodite sculpture, naked as all get-out, and think about white supremacy. He’s probably never seen a Greek or Roman sculpture. The MFA curators might think white nationalists in America number in the millions, but they don’t. Drop the dig. The link of ideal beauty to whiteness via Greek sculpture dates to Goethe and Winkelmann and had a last hurrah among the Nazis, but it’s irrelevant today. It detracts from the very good video by Black Math, a Boston film company that used hundreds of photographs of the Athena Parthenos to create a colored, fully restored 3D video model.
The Romans had a parallel universe of gods but, as a point of departure in understanding their world, they had emperors, too. Another richly layered gallery treats the Roman imperial look, starting with Augustus. A bust of Augustus, handsome, idealized, and blemish-free, introduces this section. It’s one of thousands of sculptures of Augustus, like a coin made from one template, appearing in temples, homes, and public places throughout the empire. Augustus (63 b.c.–a.d. 14) forged and ruled Rome after the civil war that followed Julius Caesar’s murder. This head probably topped a full-length sculpture of Augustus in military regalia.
A bust of Elagabalus, who ruled from a.d. 218 to 222, is toward the end of the gallery. He’s a teenager with an early-third-century hairstyle. Coins from his rule had the same face. Much as Augustus was a most successful ruler, Elagabalus was Rome’s Bill de Blasio, a.k.a. a disaster. Aside from poor policy judgment, he married four women and, after he dabbled in cross-dressing, married his chariot driver, an athlete from Smyrna. Elagabalus might be the first recorded case of gender-reassignment surgery. He was eventually murdered.
This gallery is important in establishing iconography based on hair, dress, and, in the case of emperors, a facial type. This helps with dating and subject. The gallery also explores a big difference between Roman and Greek art: Romans pioneered portraits, a genre the Greeks didn’t have. What we know is imperfect since so much Ancient Greek cultural heritage is lost, but Romans seem to have had a sense of the individual. Roman portrait sculpture often has the look of real, idiosyncratic faces. Roman sculpture memorializes individuals, too. Funerary urns become abundant. The Greeks sometimes memorialized the dead with short inscriptions, but the Romans are far more elaborate.
A long gallery adjoining it considers how Greeks and Romans made bronzes and the centrality of proportions in fashioning the male nude. The Greeks and Romans like nudes, certainly, and sculptures of both gods and athletes required perfect bodies with exact, even mathematical, proportions. A male torso from around a.d. 125 is based on the Greek sculptor Polykleitos’s Doryphoros, or spear-bearer type from the fifth century b.c. The swing of the hip, slope of the shoulders, and diagonal line from knee to knee, precisely measured, evoked an animated figure.
I entered the Behrakis galleries through the space devoted to the gods. I was perfectly happy to begin looking at Greek and Roman art with the gods front of mind since they propel most of it. Another entrance, also off the MFA rotunda, starts the visitor off in a different way, in about 800 b.c. This space is chronological, more or less, taking us to around 450 b.c. and the height of Classical Greek power and style.
I look at it this way. My exposure was a top-to-bottom one launched by the gods, who are a consistent theme, then to the emperors, portrait sculpture, and how artists interpreted the human body. What the MFA calls the Early Greek Art Gallery mixes a chronological look and a personal touch. This gallery emphasizes the development of storytelling and aspects of everyday life.
It’s mostly smalls, and this makes for intimacy. Greek vases are decorated with storylines from The Iliad and The Odyssey, so the gods are less abstract. We see the divinities, to be sure, but in the context of human-interest stories. Here we learn about the Greek economy, trade, and the real estate occupied by Greek culture. Art from Turkey, Sicily, and Cyprus is broadly Greek but with a particular twist.
The early art seems closer to the natural world. Monkeys, birds, dogs, lions, boars, and horses sometimes suggest personal traits like loyalty, strength, and coyness and are sometimes simply charming. Monsters, griffins, sphinxes, sirens, and the gorgon Medusa aren’t charming, but who objects to a little quality time with the grotesque? A drinking cup from around 500 b.c. shows a fire-breathing monster with a guinea fowl’s body and a donkey’s head, jostling with a female archer in a foreign dress riding a lion. A white snake emcees the looming mêlée. Goya could not have been more fanciful and more sinister.
This is good fun, but I’m drawn to the evolution of the human form in Greek art since this is so critical in art history. Early bodies come as the sixth-century kouros, depicting a young man, or kore, a teenage girl. They’ve got heads, torsos, legs, and arms but look like totem poles. They’re blocks sculpted in human form but with no stab at motion. Vases are more animated. A drinking cup from 510 b.c. depicts an athlete running with jumping weights. A pot from 40 or so years later shows a brawny athlete flexing his muscles. He’s wearing a laurel, telling us he has won. In other galleries, we see the figure become more plastic and organic. The study of proportions, once it makes its way to sculpture, gives us figures that look capable of movement. Since metal is more malleable, bronze casting pushes the quest for animation further.
One of the new galleries covers Byzantine art. The gallery proposes to cover more than a thousand years, from a.d. 330, when the Roman emperor Constantine ditches the gods for Christianity as the official imperial religion, to 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks. That’s a long stretch.
The big gallery means to evoke the Hagia Sofia in what’s now Istanbul. It’s not that I didn’t like it. Constantine is as transformative a figure as Augustus. The span from his time to, say, the sixth century is still Roman, as culture goes. There’s art from Roman Egypt, what’s now Syria, and early Christian pilgrimage sites in Jerusalem, and Greece. We see the new Greek Orthodox world through icons, the Greek word for “likeness.” These devotional images, usually painted, are very different from portrayals of the gods. Divinities don’t have much presence. Animation isn’t a priority. They’re rich in iconography, signaling who they are, but they’re as remote as the moon.
The figures in the Monopoli Altarpiece, from the early 15th century, are all-seeing, to be sure, but don’t seem to want to mix it up with us. This Italian altarpiece is certainly big and beautiful. It has just been cleaned so it looks smashing. I’m not sure why it’s there, though. It’s a hundred years after Giotto. In Florence, the Renaissance is under way. Monopoli is in Apulia, the part of Italy closest to Greece. Compared with what’s happening in Florence, Siena, and Urbino, it’s primitive. It looks backwards, but we’re in a space covering so much territory and so many epochs that big chunks of the storyline may’ve been dropped. Cases dealing with early Greek hymns and the revolution in weights and measures feel like outlier topics.
A nice gallery is dedicated to rotating displays of contemporary art rooted in Greek and Roman art. Il Parnasso, Rome, by Cy Twombly, is the highlight now. Twombly painted it in 1964 while he lived in Italy. Twombly said, “Modern art isn’t dislocated but something with roots, tradition, and continuity.” He went to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in the late 1940s and knew the MFA’s antiquities collection. I think all good artists look closely at the art of the past and probably know it far better than art historians specializing in contemporary art. Many have Ph.D.s, and many can’t say boo about anything before 1900.
I like the Twombly exhibition and think the gallery’s a good idea. It’s one more way to achieve the overarching goal of these gorgeous, intellectually rigorous galleries. The Greek and Roman worlds are still with us. They made us. Even the twilight of the gods has come and gone, but we can still experience them and hear them whisper in our ears.
