| Past
Exhibitions
Classical
Conversations
3 September – 18 December
2005
Beauty is not always in the eye of
the beholder. Five marble heads of women—Greek, Roman, Renaissance,
Neoclassical, and modern—"converse" in the museum's galleries
about the persistence of classicism and the ideal.
A persistent theme in Western art
is an ideal of beauty first conceived in ancient Greece that has endured
through the ages. Over time, the allure of the Greek ideal has proven universal,
as capable of adapting to the vagaries of taste as of transcending time and
place altogether. The human figure was central to the classical conception
of beauty and the female head was, and remains, a natural site of aesthetic
preference. The five marble heads on view in this focus exhibition speak
to one another across the centuries, silent tributes to the ability of Art
to surpass Nature in sustaining beauty and vanquishing Time.
The works of art selected from the
museum's permanent collection to illustrate these points about beauty and
the ideal are a Greek Hellenistic head of a woman (possibly Aphrodite; 3rd-1st
c. BCE); a portrait of Faustina the Elder (wife of the emperor Antoninus
Pius; ca. 150 CE); Hiram Powers' allegorical bust of Faith (ca.
1870); and Elie Nadelman's Ideal Head of a Woman (ca. 1910). Francesco
Laurana's Renaissance sculpture of Jeanne de Laval (15th century)
is on loan to the museum from Michael Hall, New York City.
Mount Holyoke art history professor
John Varriano is guest curator of the exhibition.
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