A history of the making, loss, and recovery of some of the greatest treasures of antiquity, which poses questions about the nature of museums and the meaning of art.
In 1932, ground broke at Antioch. After years of fundraising and flurries of letters back and forth, a team from Princeton had finally assembled in the desert to see what riches might lay beneath the dry earth. The team expected to find sculptures, frescos, palace walls, and busts. Instead, they found the most extraordinary mosaics yet seen in archaeology—or the art world.
There were some three hundred mosaics in all, glories of color and design, stones and pieces of glass heaped up into spectacular images. Many of them were vast, room-sized tableaus, commissioned by wealthy Antiochenes for their villas. They depict banquets, drinking contests, olive harvests; lions, leopards, peacocks, and gazelles; legends, scenes from mythology, Cupid and Psyche, Narcissus and Dionysus. Though dated to early in the Christian era, they are unabashedly pagan; the animals and plants they depict are so life-like scholars can often identify them by species. A vast, collectively obsessive outpouring of industry and effort, art and artisanship, they stand for beauty, the drive to make it, the human need to have it as part of life.
The dig at Antioch was an astonishing feat, one that survived financial downturns, interpersonal conflict, and the looming threat of World War II. What was gained were mosaics that ultimately ended up in museums around the world—Harvard University, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, New York’s Metropolitan, Paris’s Louvre, and more than a dozen others. The dig was a feat of human cooperation and a triumph of archaeology, but it also raised profound questions about the nature of art. Who has a right to a piece of art, the country of origin or the archeologists who dig it up? What elevates someone from a craftsperson to an artist—their medium or their technique? Is a piece of art more interesting as something beautiful, or something historical? Robert Kanigel tackles these questions and more, breathing life into this historical event for the first time.
