Year: 2010

We went to the Getty Villa the other day.  This is the “old” Getty Museum, a villa built by J. Paul Getty, modeled after the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, to house his burgeoning art collection. In the 90s the Getty Foundation built a huge museum up in the hills along the 405 to house everything that wasn’t an antiquity, leaving the original Villa for the ancient art — mostly Greek and Roman.

Since Katherine’s been on a Greco-Roman mythology kick since reading Riodan’s Percy Jackson series, it seemed a fine place to go visit, even though we were there back in 2008.

We also made a point of bringing three decent cameras with us, so we could snapshot to our heart’s content.  As noted earlier, Margie shot 306 pix, Kay 352 pix, myself 460.  That includes placards so we knew what we were taking pictures of.  After a lengthy process of distillation and annotation, I got it down to 503 pictures, and uploaded it to Flickr. (By comparison, the 2008 visit netted 99 pictures.)

1. It’s nice to see A.D. and B.C. used properly.  Yes, I know that CE and BCE are the modern, more “correct” terms, but if you’re going to use AD and BC, knowing which end of which kind of dates they go on is a good thing.
2. While Katherine’s camera was not quite up to each of ours’ in strength, her perspective (physical and mental), as well as her own taste meant that she sometimes took the best picture of something, or sometimes the only picture of something.
3. It’s interesting to see, in rooms where we were not there at the same time, or which had many more items than we would have inclination or time to photograph, where Margie and I (and Katherine) chose the same subjects, and where we chose different ones.
4. I am more and more in love with “wasting” digital space by taking pictures of something, then of the placard by it describing what it is.  Useful at museums, zoos, botanical gardens, etc.  Very helpful when trying to remember days, months, years later what the hell that object was.
5. What objects (photos, sculpture, bric-a-brac) today will be the archaeological goodies of tomorrow?  What would people assume about our culture based on some random item picked up off your desk, or table, or night stand?
6. We think of Roman and Greek art in near monochrome — marble, maybe terracotta, perhaps black figure or red figure vases.  We know, intellectually, that the marble was usually painted and decorated, but we still think in that “classical white.”  But there were some great “splashes of color” in the exhibits on display — both a bunch of antique glasswork that would not look out of place in a craft glass shop today, and in a decent collection of mummy portraits, pictures of mummified Romano-Egyptians, that are gorgeous full-color glimpses at real, unmarbled people.
7. It’s also fascinating to see what was going on in the “civilized” world during Biblical times, during the first century AD.  Popular culture has an odd binary between backwater Palestine and marble-plated Rome, but there was a lot else going on that had no idea of what was going on in the former (and tried to ignore much of what was going on in the latter).
8. Sic transit gloria mundi.
9. While I think there’s a lot to recommend religion as a transcendent experience, there’s also something attractive about it as part of the day-to-day ritualistic culture, something one did rather than something one was. The Greeks and Romans had a very transactional relationship to the divine — they spent a lot more time acting on it, but a lot less time getting all tied up in emotional and political knots over it, it seems.
10. Nekkid women (or goddesses) — even nekkid men (or satyrs) — prolly okay for the general public.  “Sexual Encounter with a Hetaira” … maybe I’ll flag that for a more restricted audience.
11. People were people. That’s why all that old stuff is interesting.