17 September 2007 | Ancient
The Independent has published a “special investigation” by Robert Fisk on the recent destruction of Iraq’s cultural property: 2,000-year-old Sumerian cities torn apart and plundered by robbers. The very walls of the mighty Ur of the Chaldees cracking under the strain of massive troop movements, the privatisation of looting as landlords buy up the remaining [...]
15 May 2007 | Ancient
How many antiquities have countries such as Greece lost to foreign looters over the centuries? In the latest issue of the lavish Journal des Savants (Janvier-Juin 2006), which is “the oldest literary journal in Europe … founded in 1665,” Alessia Zambon contributes a lengthy article on “Fauvel and Greek Vases”: “[His] first taste of Greece [...]
In the April 2007 Burlington Magazine Susan Woodford reviews John Boardman’s The World of Ancient Art, which she calls an “impressive enterprise”: “Boardman’s basic tenet is that there are common human responses to common problems, and these responses to the environment are what shaped civilisations in Antiquity. He acknowledges that this view is already a [...]
2 April 2007 | Ancient, Theory
The March 2007 World Archaeology is devoted to ‘viewing space.’ In the preface, Mark Lake writes that archaeologists’ studies of this topic over the last 15 years “have been dominated by landscape studies, particularly the placement of monuments.” They have either focused on the phenomenology of “embodied experience” or “made substantial use of the visibility [...]
28 March 2007 | Ancient, Theory
In the January-March issue of Word & Image, Mary Stieber writes: “… throughout Classical antiquity, writers, poets, and thinkers were in the habit of looking to the visual arts to find ways to present and clarify various ethical and philosophical questions that modern life posed and modern literature dramatized … There is a degree of [...]
8 March 2007 | Ancient, Books, Modern, Theory
Numerous engaging book reviews can be found in the November 2006 issue of Art History (reviews editor Liz James). On John Henderson’s The Triumph of Art at Thorvaldsens Museum: ‘Løve’ in Copenhagen, writes: “Which of us, nowadays, would dare to declare our love for a monument as the motive for a scholarly study? John Henderson [...]
2 March 2007 | Ancient, Books, Contemporary
The December 2006 issue of Antiquity includes a review by Leo S. Klejn of Colin Renfrew’s Figuring It Out, followed by a reply from Renfrew. Klejn: “[Renfrew's book] is a remarkable phenomenon both in art criticism and archaeology. He poses the eternal questions (what are we? where do we come from?) and hopes to figure [...]
21 February 2007 | Ancient
From The Chronicle of Higher Education: “When he saw the letter, Donny George Youkhanna knew it was time to get out of Iraq. It was late this July, and someone had dropped an envelope containing a bullet on his parents’ driveway in Baghdad … he filed for retirement from the Iraq State Board of Antiquities [...]
21 February 2007 | Ancient
NYU Institute of Fine Arts director Mariët Westermann writes: “Professor Donald Hansen died this Thursday afternoon [Feb 15]… He came to the Institute in 1963, having earned a PhD from Harvard … His major scholarly contributions always rested on sound and resourceful fieldwork throughout the Middle East. In the course of his career, he participated [...]
5 February 2007 | Ancient, Conferences
From The Wall Street Journal: “[A] conference organized by the Institute of Archaeology and the Karman Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, in Bern, Switzerland, devoted itself to sorting out the Pantheon’s history. Breaking news, of a kind, caused an ‘absolute sensation’ (in a manner perhaps possible only at an academic conference). A revisionist [...]
2 February 2007 | Ancient, Books
Henri Meschonic recently published Le Nom de notre ignorance, la Dame d’Auxerre, a short book on a Greek statue at the Louvre. Dumitra Baron reviews the book in Acta Fabula: “How can an artwork speak to us, what can it transmit to us, what are the relationships between language and art, in what way can [...]
10 October 2006 | Ancient
From Bloomberg News: Beginning Oct. 13, “Visitors to the Vatican will be able to view its museums’ latest addition: a 2,000-year-old pagan burial ground filled with mausoleums, scattered bones and headstones, including one that belonged to one of Nero’s slaves. The cemetery almost never saw the light of day in modern times. The Vatican announced [...]
6 October 2006 | Ancient, Architecture, Journals
The June 2006 Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology features an article by Yuval Yekutieli entitled, “Is Somebody Watching You? Ancient Surveillance Systems in the Southern Judean Desert”: “The Panoptic model of surveillance, which enables a small number of observers to control large numbers of people, is usually considered a modern (18th century AD) invention and a [...]
2 October 2006 | Ancient, Books
Often perceived today as childish pablum, ancient animal stories were in fact deeply strange and serious, argue two books, one new, the other re-released. Harald Mielsch surveys ancient Greek animal stories represented in mosaics, reliefs, miniature books, carpets and frescoes. Heinz Mode’s classic on fabulous creatures (the centaur, the elephant god Ganesh, etc.) is out [...]
18 September 2006 | Ancient, Books
Also in CAA Reviews, Genevieve S. Gessert writes: “The title of Peter Stewart’s Statues in Roman Society subtly delineates the major premise of his innovative study: that the modern notion of sculpture hinders our ability to understand the quotidian functions of statues within Roman society. As explained in his introduction, ‘classical art history has generally [...]
1 September 2006 | Ancient, Books
So many art-history surveys begin with cave art, that genre for which we have so few facts and so few convincing theories. Zoology professor Dale Guthrie’s new book “The Nature of Paleolithic Art,” which argues that most cave art was made by young men with little but sex and hunting on their minds, seems to [...]
11 July 2006 | Ancient
From the AP: “A 2,000-year-old marble statue of a goddess has been discovered among dozens of broken columns and inscriptions during excavation at an ancient theater in central Greece, archaeologists said on Monday. The headless statue of hunting goddess Artemis dates from the middle of the first century B.C., archaeologist Athanassios Tziafalias said.” From the [...]
22 June 2006 | Ancient
From Ansa: “In Italy’s most sensational archaeological find in years, an Etruscan tomb near Rome has yielded the oldest examples of painting in Western civilisation. Experts could barely contain their excitement as they showed reporters five roaring lions and a flock of waterbirds that have emerged from the ground at the buried Etruscan city of [...]
21 June 2006 | Ancient, Museums
An exhibition review from Richard Dorment in The Telegraph: “The Road to Byzantium: Luxury Arts of Antiquity is about the persistence of the classical tradition. Its thesis is simple: that classical art, which originated with the Greeks in the fifth and fourth centuries BC and is always said to have ended with the fall of [...]
22 May 2006 | Ancient
From the Guardian: “It was the most famous archaeological find of all time, but still it holds secrets that have yet to be unravelled. Now Oxford scholars are preparing to post the notes, diaries, drawings and photographs from the 1922 excavation of the tomb of King Tutankhamun on the internet in an attempt to study [...]
