Christine Kondoleon is the George D and Margo Behrakis Chair, Art of Ancient Greece and Rome at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). As Chair, she has led the renovations and reinterpretations for 12 new galleries of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine art for the Behrakis Wing for Art of the Ancient World; five of them opened in December 2021. Kondoleon is curator of the forthcoming Cy Twombly: making past present, and author of the accompanying exhibition catalogue.
Laure Marest is the Cornelius and Emily Vermeule Associate Curator of Greek and Roman Art at the MFA. She holds degrees from the Sorbonne, Paris, and the University of California, Berkeley. Marest previously worked at the Getty Villa Museum, Malibu, and has excavated at Pompeii, Italy, and Butrint, Albania. A recipient of awards and grants from the Archaeological Institute of America and the Mellon Foundation, she has published in the fields of glyptics and numismatics.
Phoebe Segal is the Mary Bryce Comstock Curator of Greek and Roman Art at the MFA. She earned her BA from Brown University and her PhD in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia. She has excavated in Greece, Italy, and Cyprus, and is co-Chair of the Museums and Exhibitions Committee of the Archaeological Institute of America. Since 2008, she has curated several exhibitions and gallery renovations at the MFA, most recently Early Greek Art.
The museum was founded in 1870. Has ancient art and the material on display in the new galleries always been an important part of its collections?
Phoebe Segal: Some of the earliest objects that were collected by the museum back in 1872 came from Cyprus from the Luigi Palma di Cesnola [1832-1904] collection. You have the much larger, grander Cesnola finds and collection at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, but the MFA did receive about 300-400 objects.
Of course, like many other museums, the earliest ‘ancient’ works of art collected by the museum were plaster casts, and it was only about a decade into the museum’s history that it began to collect original works of ancient art in earnest. The gift from the Archaeological Institute of America’s excavations at the Greek city of Assos in Behramkale in Turkey were the first excavated objects that came into the museum, and represented a rather sizeable corpus that is featured in one of our new galleries: the Early Greek Art gallery. Around the same time, also in the 1880s, the museum subscribed to the Egypt Exploration Society, and so received finds from Naukratis as well. These are held mostly in our Egyptian collection, but there are some in the Early Greek gallery too.
Laure Marest: Then there’s Edward Perry Warren [1860-1928], the Bostonian collector who moved to the UK and spent most of his life there. He was fairly aggressively collecting in Europe and sending a lot of those works to the East Coast of the United States, donating works to the MFA, but to some of the colleges too.
