Volume 48, Number 6 · April 12, 2001
Charmed Lives
By Peter Brown
Antioch: The Lost Ancient City
an exhibition originating at the Worcester Art Museum, October 7, 2000–February 4, 2001; the Cleveland Museum of Art, March 18–June 3, 2001; and the Baltimore Museum of Art, September 16–December 30, 2001
Antioch: The Lost Ancient City, catalog of the exhibition
edited by Christine Kondoleon
Princeton University Press/Worcester Art Museum,253 pp., $65.00; $29.95 (paper)
In his later years, the humorist Rob-ert Benchley was in the habit of blaming the paucity of his visual imagination on the fact that he had grown up in Worcester, Massachusetts. A mind nourished from youth on the prospect of Front Street, Worcester, he affirmed, found it impossible to conjure up more stirring scenes, such as occurred in The Adventures of Ivanhoe or in the murmurous Paris of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. In the exhibition Antioch: The Lost Ancient City, organized by the Worcester Art Museum, the humorist might have found, in Worcester itself, a little something with which to reinvigorate his sadly stunted faculty. In four cool and airy rooms on the second floor of the museum, the visitor could find a collection of carefully arranged fragments of artifacts of all kinds from Antioch, supplemented by elegant and instructive models, from which the visual imagination is challenged to conjure up the life of what was once the fourth greatest city of the Roman world.
Review, 7493 words
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