Wednesday, October 25, 2023 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Presenter: Melissa Eppihimer
204 Frick Fine Arts
This presentation will share the latest discoveries related to a copper head (now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) that has long been marginalized within the history of ancient art because of its unstable provenience and extraordinary appearance.
Information from newly accessible digital databases and archives offer a new view of the head’s ancient and modern lives, revealing it to be a work from ancient Iraq that became associated with ancient Iran through the machinations of the 20th-century art market. Recent computerized tomography (CT) scans reveal previously unknown details of the head’s production process and raise questions about how the ancient makers and viewers of the work responded to its obvious physical flaws