On view July 14, 2018 through September 14, 2022
Supplemented with notable loans from local private collectors, this permanent collection exhibition explores The Classical World across its many centuries and vast geographical spread. Ranging from prehistoric pottery and sculpture from Cyprus, Greece, and Italy (as early as 3000 BCE) to marble sculpture and terracotta from the Roman Empire (as late as the 5th century CE), the exhibition includes a particularly fine assortment of painted pottery. Produced mainly in Greece and South Italy during the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries BCE, these black-figure and red-figure vases comprise the most noteworthy segment of the Museum’s permanent collection of classical antiquities. Collection objects selected for the exhibition The Making of a Museum: 100 Years, 100 Works are incorporated into the presentation of The Classical World.
About the Permanent Collection
The first artwork purchased by the Tampa Museum of Art was an ancient Greek vase in 1981, and this has remained an important area of collecting for the Museum ever since. The Museum’s most notable acquisition of antiquities came five years later, in the form of the Joseph Veach Noble Collection, a significant private collection of more than 150 objects amassed primarily in the 1950s and ‘60s. A collector and scholar interested in the techniques of potters and vase-painters in ancient Greece and South Italy, Mr. Noble had assembled a collection especially strong in painted pottery from those areas. While vases undoubtedly constitute the core of the Noble Collection, Mr. Noble also collected in other media, including two notable large-scale marble statues that have inspired recent exhibitions— the nearly complete Poseidon/Neptune with dolphin on view nearby (and in Poseidon and the Sea: Myth, Cult, and Daily Life, 2014), and the torso of Aphrodite/Venus discovered in 1771 (and featured in Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity, 2018). The Museum continues to add to its antiquities collection, primarily by gift, and always in accordance with the highest ethical standards.