This spring, 10 ߲ݴý students and , assistant professor of art and art history, will be part of a discovery process that professional art historians would envy.
“They will practice exactly the kind of original research, and engage with the same thorny ethical and theoretical issues, that curators, dealers, collectors and scholars do when confronting new (or newly discovered) work of art,” said Marlowe, who created the course ARTS 481, Seminar in Art Prior to 1300: New Egyptian Reliefs in the Picker: Challenges and Opportunities.
The opportunity is rare for Marlowe as well.
While searching the database of ߲ݴý’s Picker Art Gallery’s for antique objects she might use in her classroom, she stumbled upon entries for 20 large limestone figural reliefs that were in storage. She now believes the pieces — all bequeathed to ߲ݴý by Herbert Mayer, the renowned collector and New York gallery owner who graduated from ߲ݴý in 1929 — were most likely produced in Egypt in the 4th or 5th century CE.
“These works have never been studied or displayed before,” Marlowe said. “They are completely unknown to the museum and scholarly world, so one of the first questions we had to worry about, something that is a real problem in my field, is the question of whether or not they were forgeries. There’s a huge amount of fake stuff out there.”
Students will consider the reliefs from a number of angles, Marlowe said. “How do scholars reconstruct a historical context for artworks about which we have virtually no documentation? What do other reliefs produced in Egypt during that period look like? Can we determine, by looking very closely at their dimensions, style and iconography, if these all came from one building, and what kind of building that might have been? How do we know they aren’t fake? Are there cultural property issues at stake here? Why did Meyer purchase these in the 1960s for his New York gallery of contemporary art? Were any of them ever displayed in his gallery? If so, how and why?”
Marlowe’s research interests include ancient and medieval art, art of ancient Rome, reuse of ancient monuments in modern contexts, and museums. As the author of a paper titled “Framing the Sun: The Arch of Constantine and the Appropriation of the Roman Cityscape,” she was tapped in 2010 to appear in the History Channel’s “Secrets of Christianity” series. Her forthcoming book is Shaky Ground: Context, Connoisseurship and the History of Roman Art (Bloomsbury Academic Press).
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