I’ve been the the National Gallery of Art several times since the holidays. Every time, I’ve stopped to marvel at The Dying Gaul in the rotunda of the West Building. This morning, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece by Catesby Leigh on the sculpture that helps verbalize the visceral sense I had of why this is an incredible work. If you’re in D.C. while this is on display, make sure you stop by to check it out.
So this is really strange …
While I was drifting around in the National Gallery of Art’s exhibition, Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections, I stumbled across this image of Alexander the Great ascending into the heavens. Here’s a description, taken directly from the exhibit:
Alexander the Great (356 – 323 BC) truly became a legend in his own time. Having conquered much of the known world, he was said to have explored realms beneath the sea and in the sky. According to the Romance of Alexander, he ascended to the heavens in a basket attached to two starving griffins, mythical winged beasts. To make them leap ever higher into the sky, Alexander held two sticks with meat at the ends just above their heads. This plaque was found in the Byzantine fortifications of Chalikis on the island of Euboea, but it’s original use is unknown.
The National Gallery of Art stepped up to help me figure out what to do with my first free Thursday afternoon in a long time. A pair of scheduled gallery talks seemed a perfect way to decompress.
A young woman from the museum led a gallery tour of Augustus Saint Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial. I’d already seen the sculpture (pictured above) at the National Gallery during the holidays, but I figured this was a chance to get a better understanding of the exhibit. The bronzed plaster at the National Gallery has a sister version of bronze on Boston Common. National Gallery’s Tell it With Pride: The 54th Massachusetts Regiment and Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial features the magnificent bronzed plaster and an extensive collection of photos and documents detailing how the black Union regiment was formed and deployed during the Civil War.
I’ve been fascinated by this sculpture since reading Robert Graves’ For the Union Dead decades ago in undergraduate school. The stark, apocalyptic images Graves paints of Boston, including the image of “Colonel Shaw/ and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry” in a monument that “sticks like a fishbone in the city’s throat” was burned in my mind. It’s one of the first poems that truly moved me.
From the gallery tour I drifted over to the West Building Lecture Hall to listen to UCLA professor Sharon E.J. Gerstel’s talk, Witnessing Byzantium: The Greek Perspective. She packed the place, and although the lecture was a tad dry, the subject was fascinating. She focused on two artifacts that followed the theme of an exhibit at the Gallery titled Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections. One was a religious themed weaving; the other a bracelet designed to secure the sleeves of a dress. Gerstel spent considerable time in Thessalonike, a Greek city that was part of the Byzantine empire, and she gave the history of each artifact: How it survived the ages, was discovered, and how scholars pieced together its history.
On my way out of the gallery, I dropped by a room packed with Van Goghs to look again at Green Wheat Fields, a recent acquisition that is simply stunning. But what hooked me was Roulin’s Baby, which had a strange similarity to the latest internet meme that day: Devil Baby. You tell me: separated at birth?
