Events
Festina lente: Conserving Antiquity
Exhibition: Festina lente: Conserving Antiquity
Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - 11:00am
Festina lente offers an unconventional behind-the-scenes opportunity to survey
the Greek and Roman holdings in the Davis Museum's permanent collections.
Focused on collecting, conservation, and stewardship, the exhibition invites
new research and scholarship regarding a range of objects?some, deeply
beloved long-time fixtures in the Davis galleries, and others, hidden from view
for decades.
The exhibition and programs illuminate the particular challenges facing
museum antiquities collections, including questions of attribution, provenance,
and authenticity; the science of investigation; changing strategies and shifting
aesthetics in restoration; the function of and framework for managing
fragmentary objects; the search for traces in abraded and eroded surfaces; and
trends in collecting over time.
Featuring vases and vessels of all sorts and designs, relief portraits and standing
figures, mosaics, coins and jewelry, human and animal forms, the scope of the
collection reveals tremendous vitality of form and function rendered in glass,
terracotta, clay, metal, and stone.
The classical adage, Festina lente?to "make haste slowly"?was greatly favored
by the first Roman emperor, Augustus, and seems particularly apt in relation
to the collecting and conservation of antiquities. The balance of urgency and
diligence, risk and caution is a perfect description for the dynamic focus on
collecting, art history and archaeology, scientific research and conservation
treatment that distinguishes this project?and indeed, to the larger project of
museums overall.
Curated by Lisa Fischman, Ruth Gordon Shapiro '37 Director of the Davis,
Festina lente and related programs have been generously supported by Wellesley
College Friends of Art.
