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….