Tiffany Jenkins

Tiffany Jenkins (Ph.D.,  University of Kent) is the author of Contesting Human Remains in Museum Collections: The Crisis of Cultural Authority (Routledge, 2014) and Keeping Their Marbles: How the Treasures of the Past Ended Up in Museums and Why They Should Stay There (Oxford University Press, 2016). She has been the host of multiple BBC Radio 4 series, a columnist for The Scotsman, and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her essays are published on the Behind the Scenes at the Museum Substack.

With your book on the Elgin Marbles, I'm sure you knew that you would get a strong reaction no matter what position you took. What response has surprised you the most?

I was surprised to find that most of the reaction refused to engage with one of my main points, which is more analysis than polemic.   

One of the main arguments I make in Keeping Their Marbles is that whether its the calls for the return of the Elgin Marbles, the Benin Bronzes, or Aboriginal human remains, the clamour for repatriation is most often generated within institutions themselves –the activists are inside the museum, not outside. This is a result of museum curators’ own crisis of purpose, that is,  the pursuit of truth and its dissemination. I suggest that the foundational principles of the museum, to investigate and understand the world, have been scrutinized severely. Those in museum studies are schooled in post-colonialism, postmodernism, and the idea that the museum is just the agent of the elite. This has entwined with a retreat from social and political solutions to very serious problems, and has led to the targeting of culture as a way of making people’s lives better. 

But no one really responds to this analysis or engages with it. It’s like they haven’t read the book!

I saw your podcast about censorship in the arts. Is this a brand new and different sort of phenomenon, or is it similar to any trends or movements in the past?

Censorship in the present is different to that of the past. Firstly, because of who is doing it. It used to be the state that censored artists, but today it’s more likely to be artists censoring other artists. Secondly, historically, those calling for censorship were often concerned that an artwork—perhaps of a sexual nature—would have a coarsening effect and a negative moral impact. Today's activists often have a different rationale. They argue that they are the only ones who have the right to speak about the experience depicted—and thus, have the right to silence those who have no comparable experience. Thirdly, artists used to be the one’s trying to offend. Now they go out of their way not to.  This is because those doing the censoring pour over what artists have said or written, for 'problematic opinions' which creates a climate where artists self-censor for fear of what may happen if they speak their minds. Self-censorship is the real problem today. 

You might find this panel discussion about cancel culture of interest.

If you had an airport layover and had only a few hours to spend in a museum -- any museum in the world --where would you spend it?

I have never been to the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and I am not likely to be able to do so soon due to the war, but I would love to some time in the future. Though given its collection includes 3 millions works of art, archeological artefacts, I may need more than a few hours….  

Jacqueline DiBiasie-Sammons

Jacqueline DiBiasie-Sammons (Ph.D.,  University of Texas at Austin) is Assistant Professor of  Classics at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi. Her research focuses on ancient Roman graffiti. She served as the Field Director of the Herculaneum Graffiti Project.

Your dissertation was on graffiti in ancient Pompeii. Some would say graffiti is not art, but I'm guessing you'd disagree. So my question is: is all graffiti art? and does it depend on whether we mean graffiti in the ancient world or graffiti today? 

This is a fascinating question and I want to point you to a picture I took right outside the campus of UT Austin where I did my Ph.D.: 

The line between graffiti and art is very blurry. Many people do not consider tags on subway cars to be art, yet the graffiti of the artist Banksy are worth many millions of dollars. In my opinion, all graffiti have the potential to be art -- it is in the eye of the beholder. As my research is interested in the aesthetics of graffiti (their form, handwriting, medium, style, color, effect on the viewer) I consider each piece of writing as art. What does the way the author wrote the message tell us about what they were intending to convey? What is the effect of the way the message is written on me as a viewer? 

What is the most significant discovery about Pompeii and Herculaneum that we ahve made with the new technologies that have become available over the last twenty years?

One of the biggest advances in the last twenty years is the use of archaeological science to tell us more about the past. For example, researchers in Herculaneum have analyzed the sewers to understand more about ancient diets and trade. Other scientists have used computers to virtually scan and un-wrap carbonized scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. Conservation techniques have also improved our ability to preserve these ancient sites for the next generations.

Before I saw the Ancient Graffiti Project website, when I thought of Roman graffiti, I thought of the famous scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian. Is most ancient Roman graffiti grammatically correct, or do you find lots of mistakes?

There are frequently mistakes in the graffiti: grammatical mistakes, spelling mistakes, and scratching out words. Other graffiti have what we call "substandard Latin" (sometimes also called vulgar Latin). These graffiti have spelling or grammar that are different than Classical Latin and show us the ways everyday people were speaking and using the language. For example, many Latin graffiti in Pompeii are missing the -m at the end of words, likely because it was not being pronounced. Graffiti provide testimony of bilingualism and regional variation as well.

Victor Coonin

Victor Coonin (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is Professor of Art History at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. He specializes in the field of Italian Renaissance art and is the author of From Marble to Flesh: The Biography of Michelangelo's David (The Florentine Press, 2014) and Donatello and the Dawn of Renaissance Art (Reaktion Press, 2019).

"Renaissance" means "rebirth." What, exactly, is "reborn" from the ancient world in the sculpture of someone like Donatello?

In my book on Donatello I argue that he actively helped create what we think of as the Renaissance and was not just a product of his times. He was good friends early on with the architect Brunelleschi and the painter Masaccio.  Together they revolutionized art, primarily by emphasizing an art based upon nature in the sense of prioritizing observation, rationality, science, etc., as opposed to abstraction and an art based on artificial stereotypes. Thus Brunelleschi introduces mathematical perspective, Masaccio shows rational three-dimensional space and figures in his paintings, and Donatello sculpts some of the most authentic-looking characters in the history of art, even if they are fictions.  His incredible depiction of Mary Magdalene comes immediately to mind:  

  

These artists sought to revive an aesthetic based on nature that they thought had been lost in the period we now think of as Medieval (though it wasn’t entirely true!).   

          

Your book on Michelangelo's David is so interesting. Is there a particular work from the ancient world that had an influence on him as he worked on that sculpture?

For Michelangelo the "rebirth" implied by the Renaissance, as seen in David, is that of the classical ideals of sculpture. This is both practical and theoretical in the sense that he sees his role as an artist as trying to make an ideal figure based on nature. The theoretical construct is that nature gives us all the clues of what a perfect being (human or otherwise) should look like but never actually accomplishes it. That's where the artist comes in as creator. Michelangelo's David is a rebirth of a classical premise that one can indeed sculpt an ideal male in terms of proportions, pose, expression, and other life-like forms.

Michelangelo was also up for the technical challenge of carving marble on a huge scale not accomplished since antiquity. Of course, today we are challenging these very notions of an ideal and I particularly like the contemporary riffs on the David that push back on assumptions such as gender, race, body image, pose, even scale. To get back to your initial question, Michelangelo is looking at loads of classical statues that embrace this ideal and if you wanted to choose one for comparison, the Doryphorus comes closest to a model, though Michelangelo would not have seen the versions typically pictured today. He had many more things to look at, however, than we commonly think. Remnants of the classical past were plentiful. Michelangelo was especially enamored of two sculptures that were in Rome: the Belvedere Torso and the Laocoön group, though the latter was discovered only after he had finished the David:

Which figures or episodes from ancient Greece and Rome seem to appear most frequently in the Renaissance art you study?

The various ideals of males and females predominate, whether they are in the form of a god or goddess, an athlete or other guise. The basic assumption was that there existed a common ideal of beauty, an assumption we vigorously challenge today. In the Baroque period that follows we find more interest in the bizarre or unusual but typically in the Renaissance the preferred aesthetic is for the ideal of nature.

Stephanie Pearson

Stephanie Pearson (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is the founder and content creator of Museums.love, which draws on her years of experience leading tours of art museums in Berlin, where she has worked at the Pergamon Museum, the Altes Museum, and the Neues Museum. She is the author of The Triumph and Trade of Egyptian Objects in Rome: Collecting Art in the Ancient Mediterranean (De Gruyter, 2021).

Your website is a great resource for museum lovers. If I had just two hours I could spend at any museum in the world, where should I spend it if I wanted to have the best possible experience of classical art?

This turned out to be a surprisingly hard question! Trying to narrow down the options, the main factors I considered for my answer are (1) the objects themselves, (2) the educational presentation of the objects, and (3) the atmosphere of the place itself. Because I’m not usually wowed by blockbusters, and I don’t know any standouts in the educational aspect, I’ll focus on the atmosphere.

The Getty Villa in California is rightfully known as one of the most beautiful places to see ancient art, because the building and landscape are gorgeous. Moreover, they recreate something of the setting of an ancient Roman villa – so there is a great learning factor hidden in the scenery. The atmosphere is also fabulous in the Montemartini museum in Rome, where ancient marble sculptures are tucked among the industrial tanks and pipes of a onetime electrical plant. Like the Getty Villa, it’s stunning – but for totally different reasons!

Ultimately, though, one of my favorite places to experience ancient art are the tiny museums in the Mediterranean that no guide book would ever have you visit. In Turkey there is a little, unassuming, office-like building in every village of a certain size, and in that building are the ancient artworks that were found nearby. These buildings are usually empty of people, off on a side track. The quiet invites reflection. The immediate connection between the place you’re standing and the art you’re looking at is intoxicating. Also, the artworks are often pieces that don’t make it into textbooks or big museums, so you find crazy stuff that hasn’t been accepted into the canon.

          

What is a work of art that most people don't know about but probably should know about?

One of my favorite pieces to talk about with students is the statue of Hor-sa-tutu in Berlin’s Neues Museum:

 Although it’s highlighted by its position at the end of a long gallery, most people walk right by it. Hor-sa-tutu’s face is shown wrinkled and carefully individualized; we can easily imagine the man who sat for this portrait to be made of him. His hairstyle is also carved in the fashion of the day. Overall, the impression is of a fairly lifelike statue, like those of Roman emperors. Yet the dark stone used for the statue is not marble but granite, typical not of Roman but of Egyptian art. And if you walk around to the back of the statue, you see the remains of a back pillar and even hieroglyphs – also quintessentially Egyptian.

To me this statue is an amazing embodiment of how Greek, Roman, and Egyptian cultural traditions could flow into one another in a way that we modern people can hardly imagine. We think of these three cultures as being discrete, easily separable from one another; but to the ancient people living at their nexus, they were all just one entity called Life, or Me, or This Is Just How Things Are. Hor-sa-tutu chose the most effective way to present himself in statue form, which involved an individualized face combined with a hieroglyphic inscription. Although we call the former Greek or Roman and the latter Egyptian, he might not have differentiated these at all. Relativizing our own perspective like this is one of the main things I’d like people to get out of an encounter with ancient art.

You can probably think of works that are underrated or underappreciated. Can you think of any that are overrated? (Since the artists are dead, I guess you don't have to worry about offending them!)

You’re right – although I do worry about offending the researchers who so diligently study all the well-known works of art! For most of those works I can recognize their educational or aesthetic value for us today, even if they don’t strike me personally as all that great. And yet… Lots of excellent scholars have written about the Doryphoros and the Primaporta Augustus, which are certainly important statues, but really not interesting for my preferred explorations of antiquity (since both of those statues are primarily about idolizing men and their power). The one statue which I find bland beyond measure, and which I have seen world-class professors address with a glazed-over look, is the Apollo Belvedere:

The Apollo Belvedere: Overrated?

It’s a fine example of some principles of ancient art, but other statues would do just as well in a much more interesting way! I know I am making enemies among the Renaissance artists by saying that. They loved him….