Ancient Mediterranean Art
Attributed to the Darius Painter, Classical Period (ca. 480–323 BCE), Apulia (southern Italy), Volute krater (mixing bowl) depicting Medea at Eleusis (A); Dionysian scene (B), ca. 340–330 BCE. Princeton University Art Museum. Museum purchase, Carl Otto von Kienbusch Jr. Memorial Collection Fund in honor of Francis Follin Jones. Photo: Jeffrey Evans
The Museum’s collection of ancient Mediterranean and Byzantine art numbers more than 7,000 objects that were made and used throughout the ancient Near East, Egypt, Greece, Italy, and the Roman and Byzantine Empires. Ancient Mediterranean art is foundational to the Museum: It not only contributes some of the Museum’s oldest works of art but also includes objects given by William Cowper Prime and Mary Hollister Prime and by Allan and Eleanor Marquand, forming part of the Museum’s earliest collections in the late nineteenth century.
Cylinder seals, ceramics, and a statue of a female votary are among the objects that were made and used by those peoples living in Mesopotamia and the Levant. Egypt is represented with carved stone reliefs, statuettes and amulets of the gods, and wooden cartonnage sarcophagi lids, all of which were essential to funerary and ritual contexts. Greek art includes important examples of Athenian black- and red-figure vases, marble votive and funerary reliefs, and Hellenistic terracotta figurines. Objects from ancient Italy include bucchero ware, bronze and alabaster cinerary urns, and metalwork. The Roman Empire is a particular area of strength and includes portrait busts, funerary monuments, and a spectacular silver cup decorated in relief with Dionysian scenes. Princeton’s long history of archaeological research in Roman Syria, conducted in the 1930s through a partage agreement, has built a substantial collection. Finds from excavations at Antioch-on-the-Orontes, a cosmopolitan city at the center of ancient trade routes, transform our understanding of everyday life from Hellenistic Greece through to the Ottoman period. Such objects include marble sculptures, polychrome mosaics, and more than 13,000 small finds representing aspects of daily life. Finally, the art of Byzantium, or the eastern Roman Empire, includes icons, ritual implements, and a spectacular bronze hand holding an orb.
As with most museums whose collecting practices began in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, continued research into the ownership histories or provenance of ancient Mediterranean objects is an institutional priority and is essential for uncovering the objects’ histories and determining how public access to them should best be maintained.