Leseprobe

17 The Collection of Antiquities Dresden’s Collection of Antiquities, a substantial part of the Skulp- turensammlung’s overall holdings, comprises over 10,000 works and boasts a kaleidoscopic wealth of objects: from small precious cameos and intaglios to larger-than-life-sized sculptures in marble, from statuettes made of durable clay to vessels of fragile glass, from simple everyday utensils to great masterpieces of ancient art. In all, these objects span a period from around 3000 BCE to 500 CE and were mainly made in Italy and Greece, but also in other regions around the Mediterranean. With such rich holdings, only a fraction can ever go on display in the new permanent exhibition at any one time. This volume thus presents a representative selection, giving readers a compact overview of this important collection, which was originally one of the earliest and largest of its kind north of the Alps. Then as now, the timeless beauty of such statues as the Dresden Boy , the so-called Lemnian Athena, the Dresden Zeus , and the three famous Herculaneum Women casts a captivating spell on those who behold them. On the one hand, these Roman sculptures provide information on the visual representation of gods and humans in antiquity, while, on the other, they are testaments to a unique process of acculturation in which the imperial Romans turned to the Greeks as exemplary models of art and culture. Indeed, we primarily have Roman sculptures to thank for fleshing out our understanding of the masterful accomplishments of the Greek sculptors before them. But even less famous objects reveal valuable insights into the world of antiquity. Greek funerary reliefs, vessels of clay and even marble, Etruscan urns, Egyptian mummies, Roman sepulchral monu- ments, and Palmyrene tombstones bear visual testimony to individual human lives, belief in gods, the afterlife, and the cult of the dead. They illustrate how burial forms varied from culture to culture and how memories of the deceased were kept alive. Besides self-representation, the numerous Roman portraits above all embody the idea of memoria , of remembering and commemorating the deceased. Meanwhile, portraits of rulers such as the imposing cuirassed statue of Emperor Antoninus Pius are aggrandizing displays of a power that still impresses us today.  |  sw