Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill (2015) p/b 334pp (727 colour ills.) £105.00 (ISBN 9781469625515)
Ackland Art Museum, in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which opened in 1958 under the name of the Ackland Art Center, was made possible by the bequest of William Hayes Ackland (whose tomb, as a stipulation of his will, is housed in the Museum). The words on the tomb state that ‘He wanted the people of his native South to know and love fine arts’, and the Museum houses artefacts of a vast range of periods from all over the world. The present handsome volume gathers together the holdings in the area of ancient art from countries bordering on the Mediterranean, including the Nile Valley, the Near East, Iran, etc., with the emphasis on Greece and Italy.
The stages by which the original holdings were increased over the past 60 years are explained in the (notably helpful) Introduction—the items came mainly from private donations given by local worthies or through purchases on the art market but also from other museums (Boston, New York, Yale) when the duplicates there were de-accessioned. The name Immerwahr (Henry and Sara), well known to classicists of various disciplines, appears again and again in the Greek section of donors. After the UNESCO 1970 convention on the illicit purchase of cultural property and its subsequent memoranda, the Museum increased its holdings at a slower rate than previously, but its harvest is an impressive repository of representative pieces that are beneficial to students at the University and local schools, and a delight for transitory visitors.
The catalogue consists of several cultural divisions and subdivisions (such as stone, varieties of pottery, metal, glass), and each object is illustrated with one or more bright coloured images, always shown alongside the descriptions, so avoiding the need to move to and fro from text to image. For each object care is taken to fix the places and dates of origin, provenance, size (in both centimetres and inches), names of donors, previous publications, descriptions and such, followed by the initials of the scholars responsible for each object. The explanatory texts are the work of a number of graduate students who worked on the material over the years, under the guiding hand of Mary Sturgeon. The tour of cultures and times concludes with a section on Modern Works, i.e. intentional forgeries that have crept in, as known or unbeknown fakes. Throughout the catalogue, attention is paid to lucidity that aims to assist beginners and amateurs, as, for instance, the conventional terminology is accompanied by more comprehensible terms, e.g. kylix/cup, lekythos/oil vase. A set of maps would also have been a useful aid in navigating the classical cultures.
An appendix that presents more than 200 ancient coins given by a private donor in 2012 shows that the Museum still attracts bequests that will still further enrich the students and the general public at Chapel Hill.
Brian A. Sparkes