The Collection

From the frontal stillness of the Archaic kouros to the wet drapery of the Hellenistic age, the Sculpture department traces the slow Greek discovery of the living body — and the Roman appetite for copying, owning and out-staring it. Marble, limestone and bronze, in fragments and in the round. Read more on the subject in The Portrait as Power.

A painted vase is the closest the ancient world comes to a printed page. Across black-figure and red-figure, the Ceramics department holds the storyboards of myth, the etiquette of the symposium and the everyday weight of oil and wine. To learn how to look, begin with our essay Reading the Vases.

The smallest objects in the museum carry the largest ambitions. A coin is portrait, manifesto and mass medium at once — minted by the thousand to put a face, a victory or a god into every hand. The Numismatics department spans Greek silver, Roman gold and the propaganda of empire; see also Faces of Empire.

Here the ancient world speaks in its own hand — incised, scratched and cast into bronze, stone and the black mirror-shine of bucchero. The department gathers Etruscan engraving and the inscribed memory of the Mediterranean: votives left for the gods, the names of the dead, the still-half-legible vowels of a vanished tongue. Continue with The Etruscan Enigma.