Exhibition Catalog

Gallery 302

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Over 5,000 years of art from around the world.

New Years Day

Thanksgiving

Christmas Day

The Met Fifth Avenue

Hanging Fragment with Bird and Basket

Square with Putti in a Nilotic Landscape

Fragment with Two Figures

Silenus, the Tutor of Dionysos

Necklace and Pendant Cross

Figure of a Woman

Bone Carving, Possibly of a Dionysiac Revel

Gold Glass Medallion with a Mother and Child

Medallion with a Portrait of Gennadios

Relief Frieze

Fragment with Personifications of Victory and the Nile

Plaque from a Casket with a Dancing Woman

Plaque from a Casket with a bird

Fragment of a Plaque with a Standing Woman

Hanging Showing Euthenia in a Garden

Dionysos

Bone plaque with Female Dancer

Sigma-shaped table with relief border depicting the Birth of Aphrodite and a Marine Thiasos

Portrait of a thin-faced man

Ostrakon with Lines from Homer’s Iliad

Panel of Venus, “Pudica Type”

Fragments of a Hanging with a Lotus-Motif Band

Panel with Warrior Resting

Fragment of a Woman

Four standing figures in an arcade

Painting of two monastic men

MedClois SpEx 2021 Good Life

The Good Life: Collecting Late Antique Art at The Met

 showcases the Museum’s important and rare collection of third- to eighth-century art from Egypt and reevaluates it through the lens of late antique ideas about abundance, virtue, and shared classical taste. Writers and craftspeople translated these ideas into a concept celebrated as the “the good life.” Anchored by crucial gifts to The Met of late antique art, the exhibition explores themes connected to social status, wealth, and living well in Late Antiquity.

The core of The Met’s collection from late antique Egypt was formed through public subscriptions and generous gifts in the 1890s. The first decades after the Museum’s founding was a time when profound interest in the earliest Christian art inspired scholars, collectors, and the public alike. Today, The Met continues to collect late antique art that reveals the burgeoning of literary and visual representations of a life well lived. This exhibition highlights The Met’s holdings of late antique textiles, decorative arts, jewelry, and sculpture—all highly prized by elite patrons of the Byzantine Empire’s southern provinces in Africa.

The works of art featured in the exhibition reflect the extraordinary wealth of Mediterranean Africa. In addition to marking status, these objects responded to such fundamental questions as, What does it mean to “live well”? During the period, ideas about “the good life” intersected with issues of religion, identity, and relationships with the past. As a result, these objects not only testify to The Met’s long-standing interest in late antique art of the region but also shed light on some of the aspirations, values, and lifestyles of its upper classes.

The exhibition is made possible by The Giorgi Family Foundation.

What does it mean to lead a good life? This timeless question resonated with people living in northern Africa when it was part of the Byzantine Empire during the Late Antique period, spanning the third to the eighth century. Writers and philosophers celebrated the good life and connected it with virtue, beauty, and education in the classical tradition. Craftspeople transformed these concepts into works of art with Greco-Roman mythological motifs, representing joy and prosperity. Patrons of various religious backgrounds decorated their homes with these images, displaying them on vibrant textiles, intricately carved furniture, and expensive jewelry.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wealthy New York City families and dealers began collecting and trading the valuable material and visual culture once prized by elite patrons in the Late Antique period. The foundation of these works within The Met collection can be traced to public subscriptions and generous gifts that arrived in the 1890s. Today, the Museum continues to collect Late Antique art that reveals the burgeoning literary and visual representations of a good life. The artworks illuminate some of the aspirations, values, and lifestyles of Egypt’s upper classes, and they help visualize the elements of a life well lived, such as happiness and success—ideals that continue to have meaning in society today.

Visiting Guide

The word “school” derives from the Greek scholê, which is usually translated as “leisure” in English. In antiquity, leisure was connected to uninterrupted time to think and learn. Many citizens aspired to this ideal and embraced a system of education called paideia. Its curriculum included subjects such as music, rhetoric, philosophy, and poetry. According to ancient philosophers, knowledge of these subjects could lead to both virtue (excellence of character) and happiness. Cosmopolitan centers along the Nile River, including Alexandria, Oxyrhynchus, and Panopolis, supported learning and art in the classical tradition. Alexandria, for example, boasted remarkable academic lecture halls, hosting as many as 600 students.

Domestic displays of social status often incorporated representations of themes and stories studied through the educational method of paideia. Craftsmen in Egypt translated Greek and Roman myths from poetry into visual images rendered in ivory, textiles, and marble. These works of art often featured Greek goddesses and gods such as Aphrodite, Dionysos, and their maritime counterparts. Their narratives related to fertility, abundance, and success. To understand the meaning of these images, one needed to be well educated.

Paideia and Living Well

The dry climate of Egypt preserved opulent artworks cherished by the educated elites of the Byzantine region. From about 1880 to 1930, ivories, sculpture, jewelry, and textiles were unearthed at important Late Antique sites such as Alexandria, Panopolis, and the Fayyum oasis. Their discovery created a lucrative market for Late Antique Egyptian art.

During this period, wealthy collectors such as J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) and George Fisher Baker (1840–1931) helped establish the collection of Late Antique art (also known as Early Christian art or Coptic art) at The Met. Baker’s generous gift of Egyptian textiles in 1890 still forms the core of the textile collection at the Museum. The influential art dealer Dikran Garabed Kelekian (1868–1951) also actively contributed to the development of the textile collection during his lifetime. In the mid- 1970s, Kelekian’s granddaughter, Nanette Rodney Kelekian (1926–2020), discovered album portfolios of textiles from his collection in the family home and encouraged the scholarly study of those works. In 2002, she donated sixty-three Late Antique Egyptian textiles to The Met and in 2020, bequeathed the rest of her collection to the Museum. These substantial gifts represent the later lives of Late Antique art and considerably expand our knowledge of the period’s remarkable artworks.

Afterlives of Late Antique Artworks

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