Museum Review: Rethinking Space, Light, and Pedagogy

Like many scholars of my generation, I have followed the vicissitudes of the Metropolitan Museum's classical collections over the past 40 years.1 Beginning with the conversion of the Roman Court to a restaurant in 1954, the collection has been the victim of one space-squeeze after another: the second-floor Etruscan galleries disappeared in the 1980s, when, illogically, the Greek vases migrated upstairs, divorced from the sculpture and bronzes. Even at that, except for the temporary but spectacular display of the Euphronios krater after its acquisition in 1972, the vases were crowded into antiquated cabinets and difficult to study. But the later classical collections suffered even more, being in large part relegated to storage for nearly two decades. The opening of the galleries devoted to Hellenistic, Roman, and Etruscan art is both long-awaited and welcome.2 It is the culmination of a 17-year process that began with the refurbishing of the Greek galleries, beautifully realized by the firm of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates and opened to the public in 1999. At that time, most of the Roman objects disappeared from view. Until then, in a selective but crowded display, Roman art had a home in what is now the Belfer Court, an airy space occupying the entire width of the wing where the temporal sequence now begins with Minoan, Bronze Age, and Geometric art. For years, the Boscoreale cubiculum, housed in the corner of the grand entry hall just before the entrance to the Belfer Court, constituted a kind of prelude to the Roman collection. Now there is a tiny gift shop in that space. The Greek galleries to either side of the Greek sculpture court the central, axial path to the Roman Court focus almost exclusively on Attic art and set expectations for the new wing. When one considers the earlier segregation of Greek vases from the other works in the collections, the mix of media and scale here within each chronological period is a notable feature of the display. Well-designed plate glass cases with glass shelves suspended by an ingenious system of chrome rods encourage close viewing from all angles. Both the chronological sequence and display solutions adopted in the Greek galleries in 1999 prefigure those employed in the new Hellenistic and Roman galleries, where curator Carlos Picon's philosophy of mixing media and artistic genres becomes more complex and enticing. The prelude to the feast is the transverse space that crosses the axis of the Greek sculpture court and is now devoted to Hellenistic sculpture and architecture. At its center, viewers will recognize an old friend in the great Ionic base and capital from Sardis (fig. 1). Even so, it is a peculiar object to represent Hellenistic architecture, being monumental yet strangely truncated without the column shaft. To the left, a one-and-a-half times life-sized bronze portrait statue dominates the space. It rivals the so-called Hellenistic Ruler from the Museo Nazionale in Rome for its quality and state of preservation and has been conjectured to depict a Pergamene ruler. Like several other spectacular sculptures on display, it is loaned from the Leon Levy and Shelby White collection and lacks provenance and cultural context.3 On the wall near the great bronze is a shelf devoted to fine marble portrait heads that effectively convey the huge range of emotional expressions characterizing Hellenistic portraiture. A beautifully preserved Late Hellenistic bronze statue of a man stands nearby; although headless, it preserves in amazing detail the hands, sandaled feet, and even the folds and embroidery in the fabric of his himation. The Roman Court, renamed the Leon Levy and Shelby White Court, now soars to double its former vertical volume (fig. 2). This decision seems a mixed success.4 On the one hand, its proportions are harmonic, and the segmental barrel vault in clear glass floods the court with light. The architects were, in fact, returning to the design that was preferred by McKim, Mead, and White in their 1912 plan but was ultimately rejected. An Ionic order tops the Doric order of the ground floor; behind the freestanding columns are walls and windows, making this upper story a kind of blind loggia. On the other hand, even monumental works such as the Hope Dionysos, set on the central axis at the far edge of the court, are dwarfed by the huge vertical volumes, and smaller statues as well as portrait heads on pedestals seem a bit lost. The grand space diminishes celebrated works such as the statue best known as the Old Market Woman. (The label now identifies her as an aged courtesan on her way to a festival of Dionysos a somewhat unlikely interpretation and updates her to the Julio-Claudian period.) The figures that