Yale Bulletin and Calendar

February 13, 2004|Volume 32, Number 18

This fragment of the Yale Art Gallery's newly acquired mosaic -- measuring roughly 35 by 26 inches -- shows a boy on a panther's back followed by a maenad and two satyrs. It comes from the ancient city of Gerasa in modern-day Jordan, a site Yale helped excavate in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Yale Art Gallery acquires
floor mosaic from ancient city

The Yale University Art Gallery has acquired five major fragments of a floor mosaic from a second-century house at the ancient city of Gerasa (present-day Jerash in the northern part of Jordan).

The fragments, part of a mosaic showing figures and scenes from classical mythology, feature an outer border of two muses, Euterpe and Erato, and a processional scene in which Dionysos and Ariadne ride in a four-wheeled wagon drawn by piping centaurs. The procession also includes images of the god Pan riding on a goat, a boy riding on a panther and several erotes, satyrs and maenads.

A large portion of the same floor is in Berlin's Pergamon Museum, and additional fragments are in the Kelsey Museum in Ann Arbor, and in the Wheaton College Museum of Art, as well as a private collection in New York.

The Yale Art Gallery already owns a few mosaics, almost all from Gerasa, a site that Yale excavated jointly with the British School in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The mosaics already in the University's collection are in a linear outlined, flat proto-Byzantine style from sixth-century churches, while the new acquisitions are in an illusionistic classical style from a second-century house.

"Mosaics are one of the major art forms from the ancient Greek and Roman worlds," says Susan B. Matheson, the Molly and Walter Bareiss Curator of Ancient Art. "With this acquisition, it will be possible to provide a representative picture of style, technique and iconography in ancient classical and early Byzantine mosaics from the same city over the space of 400 years."

This acquisition was made possible through the Ruth Elizabeth White Fund. A passionate collector of antiquities, White (of Southbury, Connecticut) decided after a visit to the Yale Art Gallery in 1988 that the teaching museum would make the best use of her collection. Upon her death in 1998, she bequeathed more than $4 million for the acquisition of objects in the fields of Greek, Roman and Etruscan art and for publications related to ancient art.

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