By Isabella Carrero-Baptista
A guest art history professor emerita spoke about a 2,000 year old statue in honor of a recently deceased former University of Maryland professor.
Carol Mattusch from George Mason University was the speaker at the Marjorie S. Venit Memorial Lecture this year at the Parren Mitchell Art-Sociology building on Nov. 17. The biennial event that invites an expert and friend of Venit to speak on ancient Mediterranean art history and archaeology. Venit endowed the lecture in her will before she died of cancer in 2017, according to assistant art history professor Emily Eagan, one of the organizers.
Around 50 students, professors, alumni and retirees attended the event. Attendees mingled as they sipped tea and ate baked treats in the Art-Sociology Building atrium, which showcased student-made modern art pieces.
Classics professor emerita Lillian Doherty, who knew Venit, emphasized the influence ancient art has in modern times.
“A lot of contemporary artists and writers are taking inspiration from ancient art and literature and have been making it new, recreating it for our own time, for our own world,”[22:33] Doherty said.
Abstract, mixed-media sculptures made of wood, wire and string surrounded them as many caught up with old friends and professors.
“It’s a really nice occasion to see everyone, everyone comes back… it’s also just really cutting edge scholarship,” Tony Cui, a PhD candidate in art history at UMD, said. “I’m not an archaeologist but you can learn so much from that field.”
Venit introduced Mattusch to the peculiar statue when she was overseeing a student’s master’s thesis.
“Just to have a whole bronze statue from antiquity is unusual, and for this statue to have been unknown to me and most other people…it was just incredible,” Mattusch said.
It was a bronze statue of what is likely a young Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and theater. Found tangled in a fisherman’s net in a Syrian river in the late 1950s, the statue remained practically untouched for the next 50 years.
Ancient bronze statues are a rare find, according to The National Gallery of Art, which knows of less than 200 today, including incomplete pieces.
They are so scarce because bronze is easily melted down and repurposed. Mattusch said this often happened when the commemorated figure “fell from favor,” a frequent enough practice that ancient Romans had a phrase for it: “damnatio memoriae,” meaning damnation of the memory.
“Every major city in the ancient world had literally thousands of statues,” Mattusch said.
“If you think of all the equestrian statues in Washington [D.C.], it’s nothing to what they had.”
This still occurs today, most recently with the removal of the bronze statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, which The Washington Post reported will be melted down and reused in a new piece of public artwork.
“It helps us to know these things because it helps introduce us to the modern world,” Mattusch said.
The bronze statue is well preserved, allowing its many repairs to be seen clearly.
Since the statue is so well preserved, multiple repairs can be seen. The most interesting one is a section of the base that has been replaced with shiny black bronze, a material Mattusch said was often used in Chinese mirrors. The hand gesture suggests that the statue originally held a wine cup, supporting Venit’s belief that the statue’s purpose was to offer “an invitation to a joyful evening in some Roman villa.”
“[In this field] we have to think of the questions to ask and we have to be satisfied that we may not find answers,” Mattusch said. “But, here we’ve got some answers and we can’t be sure what the questions should be.”
Featured Image: Art history professor emerita Carol Mattusch handles a bronze head. Photo from The University of Maryland Department of Art History and Archaeology.