Seattle Museum: Venue For Roman Art

Organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Musée du Louvre the exhibition features 184 works drawn from the Louvre’s unparalleled collection of Roman art, including mosaics, frescoes, terracotta statuettes, monumental sculptures, sarcophagi, marble reliefs, glass and metal vessels, and gold jewelry, most of which have never traveled to the United States.

Presented thematically, the exhibition examines everyday Roman public and private life through different lenses, including religion, urbanism, war, imperial expansion, funerary practices, intellectual life, and family. This is the largest special exhibition that SAM has ever presented and is made possible due to the museum’s recent downtown expansion, which nearly doubled the special exhibition galleries.

“Our new expansion gives us the rare and historic opportunity to bring to Seattle treasured masterworks from the Louvre’s unrivaled Roman art collections,” said Mimi Gates, Director of the Seattle Art Museum. “This coupled with the once-in-a-lifetime presentation of The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece will provide an unparalleled experience of magnificent Italian art in Seattle.”

Roman Art from Louvre is on tour in the United States because the Louvre is reinstalling their Roman galleries. Visitors to the exhibition will get a sneak preview of what the future Roman galleries at the Louvre will look like. Co-curated by Cécile Giroire and Daniel Roger, curators in the Department of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Antiquities at the Louvre, the exhibition traces the period from the late first century BCE to the fourth century CE. The exhibition explores the lives of the emperor and his court, elite and ordinary men and women, soldiers and gladiators, foreigners and slaves. It locates these individuals in the arenas in which they operated -- forum, palaces, villas, circuses -- alongside objects of daily use. Examinations of religion and the world of the dead complete the exhibition. The exhibition presents not only art made by ancient Romans, but ancient Rome as made by its art.

“The Louvre’s collection is one of the few in the world that can offer such a broad portrait of Roman life, and the exhibition is unmatched for the variety and richness of the objects selected,” says Margaret Laird, guest curator for the exhibition in Seattle and assistant professor of Roman Art at the University of Washington. “This will be a first both for SAM and for Northwest audiences.”

Exhibition highlights include:

• relief sculptures from emperor Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli; • statues of the emperors Augustus, Caligula, Trajan and Marcus Aurelius • busts of prominent Romans including Agrippa and Livia; • imperial rings, necklaces, and earrings; • statues of Isis, Venus, Minerva, and Bacchus; • early depictions of circus games, portraits of actors, and theatrical masks; • military diplomas and army medallions; • sarcophagi, urns, and related ritual objects; and • household objects found at Pompeii and Herculaneum

The exhibition will close with ancient statues that have been repeatedly repaired and altered since the Renaissance, reflecting both the ongoing interest in Roman art and the way in which it has been collected, interpreted and restored over the centuries.

Exhibition Organization and Catalogue Roman Art from the Louvre was organized by the American Federation of Arts (AFA) and the Musée du Louvre. It is co-curated by Cécile Giroire and Daniel Roger, curators in the Department of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Antiquities at the Musée du Louvre. The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. The exhibition will subsequently travel to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art (June 19–October 12, 2008).

Roman Art from the Louvre will be accompanied by a full color catalogue published by the AFA which includes new scholarship on the Louvre’s collection and was written by co-curators Cécile Giroire and Daniel Roger, as well as other scholars of Roman art, including experts from the Musée du Louvre. -- www.seattleartmuseum.org