MFA Boston Opens New Galleries for Greek and Roman Art

Hidetsugu Tonomura via Flickr

The Museum of Fine Art, Boston, (MFA) has announced the opening of three new galleries this week to showcase its collection of Greek and Roman art.

The Boston Globe reports that Christine Kondoleon and Phoebe Segal, the curators of the MFA’s Greek and Roman art department, planned the new galleries around three distinct themes: the first focuses on the works of Homer and the epics, the second on Dionysus and the symposium, and the last on theater and performance in ancient Greece.

The galleries, now contiguous and equipped with climate control technology, are designed to feature the MFA’s holdings of antiquities. Prior to the renovation efforts, they were housed in a wing on the museum’s eastern side that some say was less than ideal for preservation of the objects. The MFA’s collection of Greek and Roman art, which includes a bust of Homer, which, the Globe claims, is considered by many to be the world’s finest, is one of the strongest in the county.

“Boston has long been known as the Athens of America and there is no more fitting place than the MFA for a suite of galleries that bring alive the artistic and literary traditions of the ancient Greeks,” MFA director Malcolm Rogers said  in a statement posted on the museum’s website. “I am particularly excited that technology enables us to watch scenes from the Trojan War as they unfold on vases that are thousands of years old.”

He certainly isn’t the only one.


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