At the end of last year, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston – the city known as ‘the Athens of America’ – opened a renovated suite of five galleries devoted to the art of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium. Lucia Marchini spoke to curators Christine Kondoleon, Laure Marest, and Phoebe Segal to find out about how they are using technology and even modern art to help visitors see ancient artefacts in a new light.
Saints Christopher, Augustine, John the Baptist, Stephen, Nicholas, and Sebastian accompany a central image of the Virgin Mary and Christ Child in this vast, 3m-wide polyptych altarpiece (below). With graceful tempera paintings and resplendent gilding, the early 15th-century work was a glorious backdrop for the high altar of the abbey church of Santo Stefano near Monopoli, in southern Italy.
The Monopoli altarpiece shows a mingling of different traditions. The arrangement of a larger central panel with the Virgin and Child, flanked by full-length saints, is in keeping with Venetian painting, as are the more relaxed, sideways poses of Augustine (second from the left) and Stephen (next to the Madonna on the right), while the elongated bodies and the frontal poses of the other figures reflect late Byzantine style. The painter is thought to have trained in Venetian-controlled Crete and travelled to southern Italy to create the altarpiece.
Recent conservation has seen the warped wood treated and the panels set in a new gilded frame based on exported Venetian altarpieces, ready for the new Byzantine Empire gallery. Stephen and John have been repositioned, with John now immediately to the left of the Virgin and Stephen in John’s former spot.
Excavating the CA Archive: Derbyshire