Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 102-103. (Budapest, 2005)

ANNUAL REPORT 2005 - A 2005. ÉV - MARIANNA DÁGI: Highlighted Works of Art: Chamber Exhibition Organised by the Collection of Classical Antiquities

HIGHLIGHTED WORKS OF ART: CHAMBER EXHIBITIONS ORGANISED BY THE COLLECTION OF CLASSICAL ANTIQUITIES The Collection of Classical Antiquities embarked upon a project in December 2003, in the hopes that it would become a tradition: the series of chamber exhibitions, entitled Highlighted Works of Art. The exhibition aims to regularly present the results of the ongoing work in the Collection, to put on display newly acquired pieces, restored art objects or to introduce those pieces which have recently produced valuable scholarly results, worth of public interest. In the exhibitions of the Highlighted Works of Art in 2005, the pieces acquired by the museum in recent years were featured. The sole exception was the Spring Exhibition (8 March - 29 May), which joined the highly successful Coptic exhibition, After the Pharaohs: Treasures of Coptic Art for Egyptian Collections, presenting three burial masks made of stucco. The colourfully painted mummy masks were made when Egypt was part of the Roman Empire, in the first-second century A.D. The Summer Exhibition (7 June - 28 August) put on display one of the most important acquisitions of the collection in 2004: a limestone burial relief with a banquet scene, made in a workshop in Palmyra, circa the third century A.D. (for a photo, see Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts 101 [2004], 123, fig. 67). As the inscription on it attests, it was the tombstone of a married couple. The art of Palmyra, at the meeting point of the Mediterraneum and the Orient, reflects the melding of the Classical Graeco-Roman and Oriental cultures. The burial stele of the museum has its inscription in Aramaic, the clothing of the dead man is partly Persian, partly Greek in style, while the mourning gesture of the wife is well-known from Greek art; the frontal composition on the other hand is characteristic of the local artistic style. These features illustrate well the mixed characteristics of the work. The image of the deceased feasting in the midst of his family members was an emblematic representation of manly life, a form of expression encompassing various peoples and centuries in Antiquity: in Hellas, Italy or Mesopotamia, it offered an equally valid message.