The ‘Myth and Marble’ of Rome Comes to America

Plus, a discovery in the Sea of Sicily, an odd pick for director of the Walters in Baltimore, and the Met releases designs for a new contemporary wing.

H appy 2025! Christmas doesn’t stop news from happening, alas, and this past December the glass hive buzzed. Though not a seer, I think the splashiest, grandest exhibition of 2025 in America will be Myth and Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture from the Torlonia Collection. An impressive selection from a Rome-based private collection, the best outside the Vatican and the museums on the Capitoline, is coming to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Kimbell in Fort Worth, we learned in mid December.

I saw the collection in 2021 in Rome, and it was set to come to the U.S. but for Dr. Fauci’s Wuhan lab leak, the Covid pandemic, and subsequent mass hypnosis. The tour had to be canceled. Before the Rome show, it hadn’t been open to the public since the ’30s. The Torlonia family, which assembled the collection over 150 years, has negotiated a new tour, and it will be a glorious experience. Ancient Roman sculpture is a thing of gaudy, riveting realism, especially in imperial sculpture. Emperors look as brutal as they surely were, and their ladies pioneered the extreme perm in hair styles.

So, put Chicago and feisty, art-rich Fort Worth on your dance cards for 2025, or Montreal, since the exhibition travels there in 2026. Eventually, the gods willing, the Torlonia family will sell the collection to the Italian government, but, in Italy, hopes always hit the brick wall of dithering, dickering, and intransigence. See it while you can.

In the 19th century, the Torlonia family was among Rome’s biggest landowners and developers. Occupied for 3,000 years, and for centuries the world’s grandest imperial capital, Rome reveals layers of history and, sometimes, art and architecture with every plunge of a backhoe. Much of the Torlonia sculpture was found during construction projects. Italians are practiced in moving fast to archeological-dig mode, but antiquities are found both on land and under the water.

Last month, the Superintendence of the Sea of Sicily, which regulates exploration around Sicily, released photos of a shipwreck find three miles off the coast of Syracuse in eastern Sicily. Fishermen found what seemed to be big ceramic pots poking from the seabed, about 230 feet under water, and notified the government.

Partnering with a professional commercial-diving company, the agency discovered 40 pots, still in a neat row after the ship carrying them sank around 2,000 years ago. The remains of the ship are likely in the sand below. The pots are ribbed amphorae and were probably used to transport alum, a preservative used to fix textile dyes, from Sicily to points east.

The find shows us that discoveries happen all the time. Deep-diving advances and underground and underwater X-ray technology teach us more than we ever knew. And we see that marine life’s savvy in turning an amphora into a deluxe apartment.

For 2,000 years, sea critters have been making the pots into happy homes. Will the Italians excavate? Not now, or not any time soon. Seahorses, mottled groupers, and saddled sea breams can breathe easy in their terracotta villas. Italy’s packed with antiquities. For the time being, documentation of the find will be used in the study of ancient trade routes.

Speaking of trade: In December 2023, Sotheby’s did something revolutionary. It prescribed a flat 10 percent seller’s premium and a more or less flat 20 percent buyer’s premium, hoping to increase consignments and sales with a more transparent system and put an end to haggling, especially from sellers. After a year’s try, Sotheby’s abandoned the reform for a return to the Wild West. I’m sorry to hear this, but 2024 was a bit of a dud at Sotheby’s, and they think consigners, mostly rich, lust at the chance to bargain, squeeze, pinch, and bruise to get a better deal than the mogul next door. Starting in February, it’ll be same old, same old, with what Sotheby’s calls “bespoke terms” available once more. Sotheby’s is a business, I know, but, along with Christie’s, they’re the gold standard in the art market, which is classier than, say, drug cartels in Mexico. Transparency should rank high.

I’m very fond of the Walters Art Museum, an idiosyncratic, old-values place with a first-rate collection, and I like its hometown, Baltimore, too. That said, Kate Burgin, the Walters’s newly picked director, is an odd choice. She’s not an art historian, which I find astounding, and has an M.B.A. from Harvard, a useless credential for a museum like the Walters and possibly a hindrance, given that Harvard’s the capital of convolution. She was a longtime not-for-profit consultant, working for the Boston Consulting Group.

The Clark Art Institute, where I was a curator for years, was heavy on high-priced consultants. My Yankee common sense serves me well on most things. I saw consultants as a crutch for an insecure director and a disengaged board. A solid gold crutch. The Clark has spent millions on consultants. Almost all flirted with charlatanism. The most honest — or indiscreet — admitted they served as an in-house psychiatrist. When I became a director, I rarely hired one.

One of the core jobs of an art museum director is quality control. The Walters has curators with deep expertise, but it’s up to the director to develop and implement the scholarly program. Curators sometimes go on la-la-land intellectual toots, and the marketeers and child educators will tend to cater to the lowest common denominator. Can Burgin enforce high standards entwined with scrutability? Has she ever been a teacher?

Burgin once worked for the Walters as a deputy director, developing its DEI plan. This seems to be her specialty. She now works for a company called Catalyte, which is “leading at the intersection of AI, data, cloud, and cybersecurity,” and she accommodated “underrepresented communities” in job placement. What does any of this have to do with an art museum? The answer’s “nothing.” Oh, and she’s a Walters trustee, which is rich. An odd choice, indeed.

Big donors, and, besides them, anyone with taste, want to commune with a director who’s a program person, a scholar, someone who can stand in front of a painting for ten minutes and enlighten, or at least entertain. No one ought to want an authority on the Underrepresented in Outer Space.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s been struggling with collecting contemporary art since the ’60s, with the dinosaurs among its masters correctly believing that the Guggenheim, Whitney, and MoMA covered this field, but with the butterflies wanting to be all things but especially colorful sprouts lasting a few hours. The Acheson Wing of the museum, opening in 1987, gave a home to a permanent, contemporary collection, but no one was happy with it or the mission. The dinosaurs hated it. The butterflies felt the museum was half-hearted in its commitment. The tech boom created billionaires who were committed to contemporary art at the Met. The dinosaurs, well, went the way of all flesh, and now we have the Tang Wing, the $700 million project — including an endowment to fund the place — to make the Met a heavy hitter in the art of today. The Met released the design three weeks ago.

The Acheson Wing will be no more. It reeked of ambivalence and seemed small and an afterthought. It never related to the rest of the Met complex. The Tang Wing will take its place. I’m a Methodist and we don’t believe in the Catholic sacrament of Reconciliation and so, in an ideal world, I would want the Met to live with the Acheson Wing for a hundred more years, “make do” in Vermont style, and respect the philanthropy that made it rather than waste it.

Alas, Manhattan ain’t rural Vermont. We wear twill for belts here if we’ve worn out the leather ones. Big donors have been itching to build a new Met contemporary wing for years. In Max Hollein, the museum has a director who’s a contemporary-art specialist. Ten years ago, the Met hired the British architect David Chipperfield to design a new wing, but his plan flopped because of cost. Now, in Oscar and Agnes Tang, they have an anchor donor and a new vision. It’s time to get it done.

The new plan’s a good one. It connects with the Met’s other, older wings via eight entrances. No one can say the Tang Wing’s isolated. At the back corner of the museum, it faces Central Park and invites it indoors through limestone lattice walls. It’s next to the newly redone Michael Rockefeller Wing of African and Oceanic Art, which makes sense and will serve as a standard for the contemporary American art the Met collects. If it’s lazy, one-dimensional identity art, the art in the Rockefeller wing will blow it to bits.

Frida Escobedo is the architect. I’ve never heard of her. It’s obvious for the Met to hire a Mexican woman, based in Mexico City, for the job. I looked at her firm’s website and her past projects. What she’s proposed looks nice, and all the Met movers and shakers want it to happen, so all we can do is hope for the best for what’s the greatest museum in the world.