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Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore Re-opens

After closing its doors for three years and undergoing a $24-million renovation, the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore has reopened. With a collection that spans 55 centuries of art, the renovation has enabled the museum to arrange more than 2000 objects to tell the story of Western civilization in its new permanent collection installation which it is calling "Wondrous Journeys: The Walters Collection from Egyptian Tombs to Medieval Castles."

This presentation of the Walters’ renowned collection does more than display individual works of art by theme or chronology; it narrates history, offering a window on the past, the customs and beliefs of the world’s great cultures, and the daily lives lived within them. Enhancing these stories are dramatic galleries and theatrical installations created to evoke the time and place where these works of art would have originally been viewed, such as a Roman tomb or a Gothic cathedral. Visitors to the Walters are encouraged to make this journey from beginning to end, or to create their own paths.

The story of Wondrous Journeys begins in the ancient world of Egypt, which visitors enter through a simulated pylon temple gateway created using blocks from two temples in the Delta region of Egypt; the gateway is flanked by a pair of monumental stone figures of Sekhmet, the lion-headed goddess who brings violence and plagues. These 3,000-pound statues are two of the 730 known to have been made around 1380 B.C., during the reign of King Amenhotep III. The two Sekhmet figures have been obtained through an extended loan agreement with The British Museum in London.

Once inside the Egyptian galleries, visitors may explore one of the Walters’ best-known and popular collections. Objects range from the luxury glass and the faienceware of daily life to large-scale temple reliefs, granite busts of kings and priests, and the Walters’ Mummy, displayed with funerary objects such as canopic (organ) jars, a grouping of amulets, and a set of nesting coffins. A cat mummy wrapped in linen bandages lies alongside a bronze falcon reliquary containing mummified bird bones.

Adjacent to the Egyptian collection is the Ancient Near East Gallery, which includes works from 3500 B.C. to the first century A.D. Although the Walters’ collection of Ancient Near Eastern art is relatively small, it is remarkably comprehensive, including works from every major culture of the region: Sumerian, Mesopotamian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Hittite. Known as the cradle of Western civilization, the Near East–which encompasses present-day Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel–is considered by many scholars to be the birthplace of writing. Accordingly, this gallery contains cylinder seals (carvings created to seal clay documents), cuneiform tablets, and a jar for storing scrolls that dates to the first century B.C. This gallery also offers beautiful examples of decorative reliefs, including works from the temple-palace of King Kapara of Gozan (modern-day Tel Halaf) and the large-scale Assyrian Winged Genius Relief (883-859 B.C.), taken from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II, a powerful and much-feared king, at Nimrud.

The Greek galleries offer a tour of ancient art that begins with the forerunners of ancient Greek culture, from about 4000 B.C., and follows through the culture’s maturity, in the fifth century B.C., to its spread throughout the Mediterranean basin and beyond in the Hellenistic period, in the first century B.C. Along the way, visitors will meet the Cycladic Female Figurine (ca. 2500 - 2400 B.C.), a simple but elegant figure created 4500 years ago; black-figure vase painting of the Archaic period; and the impressive statuary from the Classical and Hellenistic periods, including the Pouring Satyr (Roman copy after a bronze original of 370-360 B.C.) and the Aphrodite Torso, a first-century copy of Praxiteles’ statue (ca. 364), one of the most famous in the ancient world.

As visitors move from the Greek to Roman galleries, they will be greeted by a Roman Torso in Armor (first century A.D.), a larger-than-lifesize figure thought to be the emperor Caligula. Following it is one of the best collections of Roman portraiture in the United States, which includes such works as an early Republican Portrait that dates to 40 B.C.; the Head of Augustus (ca. 27 B.C.), the first emperor of Rome; and the Head of Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 161-180), the famous emperor, philosopher, and author of Meditations. Here visitors will also find the Sarcophagus Gallery, which contains one of the most extraordinary collections of ancient marble tombs in the world: the seven here were found together just outside of Rome in the underground tomb of the Calpurnii Pisones family, one of the wealthiest families in Roman history. The Roman Domestic Room features a re-creation of a Pompeian villa wall, the only bronze Roman banquet couch in the United States, a lararium (a household shrine that held small bronze figurines of deities), and luxury goods.

In the Etruscan Gallery, visitors will see exquisite works in gold, silver, and ivory from the region north of Rome that is now known as Tuscany; these range from statues to wine ladles to ladies’ mirrors–and to the beautiful cistae (Latin for "box") that held them. The Walters is known for its jewelry collections, and the newly designed Ancient Treasury will highlight spectacular examples from the Ancient Near East, Egypt, Etruria, Greece, and Rome. Here are gold rings, earrings, and necklaces worn in ancient times, including the Bracelet from Olbia (late second century B.C.), a gold work decorated with garnet, amethyst, and red, blue, green, and turquoise enamel, that reflects the elaborate adornments of Hellenistic courts.

Up the suspended staircase, on the third floor, the medieval world begins in a gallery that marks the crucible from which the Middle Ages emerged, at a time when what had been Roman lands became part of the Byzantine Empire, and the period when Christianity began to take root. Here will be the famous Rubens Vase, an extraordinary feat of carving in agate, created in an imperial Byzantine workshop in the fourth century; there will also be a trove of silver treasure from Kaper Koraon that will be installed to suggest a Byzantine altar of the sixth century.

The center of the third floor is devoted to sacred devotional objects, uniting the Orthodox cultures of Byzantium, Ethiopia, and Russia in the central, octagonal Icon Gallery, the shape of which evokes a Byzantine central-plan church. Here visitors will find the largest and finest collection of Ethiopian art outside of Ethiopia itself: small pendant crosses, coins, devotional icons from the 15th through 18th centuries, and, as the gallery’s focal point, five large crosses, draped with dramatic fabrics as they would have been seen in procession. Here also is a Byzantine tile installation painstakingly assembled from nearly 50 pieces (out of the 2,000 that were sold decades ago out of shoe boxes in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul); Russian enamels and icons; and the Torah Ark Door, a thousand-year-old panel from the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, which the Walters purchased with New York’s Yeshiva University Museum in 2000. And, in an innovation unparalleled worldwide, the Walters will display many of the manuscripts from its important collection throughout the medieval galleries, so visitors can view these texts alongside the art of the same period.

Standing at the center of the Icon Gallery, visitors will have a view into four adjoining galleries, and four religious expressions: Within the Christian tradition are the silver Byzantine altar; a Gothic altar that recalls a French cathedral in the 13th century; and a carved and painted wooden altar from Flanders around 1500.

The fourth view will be into the world of Islam, shown through works both religious and secular. These galleries reveal the diversity of the cultures of the Islamic world–Arab, Persian, Indian, and Turkish–showing especially how the arts of these cultures developed under the faith of Islam. The 17th-century Tile Plaque with the Great Mosque of Mecca, which offers a bird’s-eye view of the mosque with the Ka’ba, Islam’s holiest shrine, in the center, is just one of the works that demonstrates the importance of religion in Islamic culture. Other highlights include copies of the Koran; a Pair of Syrian Beakers (ca. 1260) that date from the Crusader period, when Islamic imagery was often combined with Christian themes; Persian ceramics and metalwork from the major artistic centers in Iran, including Nishapur, Shiraz, and Isfahan; Indian manuscripts made for Emperor Akbar in the late 16th century; beautiful polychrome ceramic vessels and tiles from Iznik in Turkey; and a large collection of Islamic arms and armor, including helmets, swords, daggers, and rifles.

The galleries that surround the octagonal center flow chronologically from the early Byzantine period and show the remarkable breadth of the Walters’ collections: a pair of early medieval Eagle Fibulae from Visigothic Spain (sixth century), among the finest in the world; the ivory Crozier Head with Eagle of St. John (13th century), a favorite piece of Henry Walters; a Head of an Old Testament King (ca. 1140), broken from its column on the abbey church of Saint-Denis during the French Revolution; the Man of Sorrows Reliquary (1347-1349), an astonishing example of Bohemian metalwork in gilded silver, enamel, and precious stones, made to house a relic from the Crown of Thorns; and Hugo van der Goes’ masterly painting of a Donor with St. John the Baptist (ca. 1475 —80).

The permanent exhibition nears its conclusion with a sequence of installations that re-create aspects of everyday life in northern Europe in the decades around 1500. Chief among these is the Knight’s Hall, the reception hall of a wealthy merchant at the end of the Middle Ages. In a presentation that is unprecedented for the Walters, visitors will be invited to sit at the large wooden table in the middle of the oak plank floor and while away time in the manner of a medieval knight over chess or backgammon. They will be surrounded by the furnishings of the castle: great tapestries, suits of armor, and a 16th-century elk-antler chandelier of a type commonly found in southern Germany.

The Walters is open Tuesdays through Sunday, 10 am to 5 pm (open until 8 pm the first Thursday of each month); closed Mondays, New Year's Day, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. For more information, visit www.thewalters.org.