High Museum set to showcase ancient artwork

Posted: Monday, October 01, 2007

ATLANTA - Eight Roman muses stand aloof, their drapery delicately painted against a burning gold background. In the next room, a landscape frames a portrait of Napoleon's wife, Josephine, who is wearing virtually the same dress and hairdo as the muses.

About 1,700 years separate the works of art, from the Roman Empire to the Empire style of early 1800s France - but they are brought together in a powerful new set of exhibits that trace the story of famed antiquities from their creation to their discovery and influence in the modern world.

"We live with the classical past, whether it's pop culture or this (museum's) architecture," said High Museum curator David Brenneman. "These objects have lives."

It's year two of the three-year Louvre Atlanta partnership, and this time the High Museum gets about 130 antiquities from the Paris powerhouse, including delicate Greek vases, Egyptian papyrus, a 3,000-year-old statue from the Middle East and muscular Roman statues.

"The Louvre and the Ancient World," with its sister exhibit "The Eye of Josephine," both opening Oct. 16, pack stunning artwork that are rarely seen in the Southeast and provide an overview of ancient civilizations from Mesopotamia to the late Roman Empire.

But instead of focusing on those ancient times, the exhibits draw links to their modern lives: The archaeological digs that the Louvre led in the early 19th century and the magnetic personalities who adorned their palaces with the priceless artifacts.

It was during their time that classical antiquities became hip, and these objects spawned scholarly revelations about how people lived in ancient Egypt and popular fashions like empire waist dresses that endure today.

Those links are especially evident in the "Eye of Josephine" show, which gathers the objects that Napoleon's wife got as a present from the king of Naples in 1802 and exhibited at her palace, Malmaison. They include nine small frescoes portraying the muses and Apollo, which had then just been excavated from Pompeii after being buried in volcanic ash for 1,700 years.

The larger show focuses on the riches the Louvre gathered from Napoleon's conquests and through its own excavations in the Middle East, which started in the 19th century and, in some places, still continue.

From ancient Meso-potamia comes one of the oldest objects in the exhibits, a 2-foot-tall statue of a local prince that dates to 2,120 B.C. A brightly painted papyrus covered in hieroglyphs from 1075-715 B.C. brings to life the Egyptian kingdoms.

Ancient Greece shines, literally, through lucid painted vases, including an amphora from 550 B.C. that portrays Hercules (Herakles for the Greeks) sporting his lion skin and fighting a three-headed monster. The Roman empire is represented by virile statues, including a towering personalization of the river-god Tiber and the bust of a second-century emperor with a detailed chiseled beard and shaggy hair.

The High and the Louvre inaugurated their three-year partnership last year with exhibitions focused on paintings and sculptures collected by French kings in the 17th and 18th centuries. That cycle drew nearly half a million visitors to the Atlanta museum.

The partnership, heralded as a new kind of collaboration that goes well beyond the occasional hosting of masterpieces, started with an exchange of high school students between Atlanta and Paris in early 2006 and will continue with yearly exhibits at the High Museum through 2009.

"The Eye of Josephine" will be on view until May 18, 2008. "The Louvre and the Ancient World" will be at the High until Sept. 7, 2008.

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