The Shockingly Bad Art of Cyprus

In the early days of New York City's famed Metropolitan Museum of Art, a collection of Cypriot antiquities caused quite the stir, pitting American hunger for Old World treasures against the artistic sensibilities of the day. The young museum's very reputation hung in the balance.

A Daring Acquisition

When the Metropolitan Museum first opened its doors on Fifth Avenue in 1880, the centerpiece of its collection was not a Rembrandt or a Monet, but rather some 20,000 ancient artifacts from an almost unknown, at the time, island inthe Mediterranean called Cyprus. These objects had been excavated and amassed by Luigi Palma di Cesnola, an Italian-born soldier turned diplomat who served as the American consul in Cyprus from 1865 to 1876. With a go-getter spirit fitting of America's Gilded Age, Cesnola criss-crossed the island digging for antiquities, claiming to have discovered the fabled treasures of ancient Idalium.

The Metropolitan Museum's trustees, eager to elevate New York's cultural standing to European heights, snapped up Cesnola's massive trove in two lots in 1872 and 1876 to the tune of around $50,000 each (around $1,300,000 in modern dollars). Nevermind that the British Museum had passed on the collection - America had captured this prize from the Old World! A condition of these sales was that the museum would hire Cesnola as its first director, a move that would prove both a boon and a bane for the institution. Cesnola's daring exploits in Cyprus had made him a media darling, but his methods and ethics would soon come under scrutiny.

A Small Problem

There was just one problem - New York's cultured classes were less than enthused with their city's newly acquired "treasures." The limestone sculptures from the ruins of Golgoi, numbering around 1000 pieces, proved especially problematic. With their "shockingly bad" mix of Greek and Eastern styles, the statues looked nothing like the classical masterpieces filling the galleries of the Louvre and the British Museum.

The The New York Times, February 22, 1880 wrote the following:

"Our museum has for its backbone the collection of Cyprian antiquities.... it may be said at once without mincing matters, that as to this collection it is entirely too large.... There are too many of these Cyprian objects. They may illustrate quite exhaustively a certain early period of art, but then it is bad art, and shocking bad art at that. Are they beautiful? Are the Cyprian statues, save with the rarest exceptions either elegant or classic? Archaeologically, ethnologically, they may teach us a great deal, but artistically hardly anything. Exactly the same may be remarked in regard to the Cyprian pottery. Honestly, can any one expiate, unless in pumped up rhapsody, over their beauty?... It may cause a cry of horror, but if nine-tenths of the whole collection of Cyprian pottery, with three-fourths of the statues, were disposed of—sold for money, and that money used for other purchases in proper directions, or exchanges made—there would be more air in the Metropolitan Museum, or at least the place vacated might be occupied by objects of greater artistic value.... The general fault then, to be found in the Metropolitan Museum is that its ambitions has run so far too markedly in particular channels. If top- heavy in one single department, it wants balance in a hundred other directions." (“The Boston Art Museum. Peculiar Features of the Collection”).

Poor attendance plagued the museum's Cypriot galleries in those early years. Some blamed the "unfortunate word 'museum'," which to the average New Yorker meant "Barnum, mermaids, woolly horses and Bowery shows of fat women," according to Cesnola himself. Others groused that the collection was simply too large and repetitive in its mediocrity.

Cesnola: The American Hero

Despite the ridicule hurled at his Cypriot antiquities, Cesnola remained a media darling, with the press eagerly recounting his valiant Civil War record and bold exploits in Cyprus. A true American success story, this Italian nobleman turned Union officer had now conquered the realm of archaeology, unearthing more ancient artifacts than the European museums had amassed in centuries.

That Cesnola achieved this feat through dubious means - such as tricking Ottoman officials to score an export permit or relying on untrained local labor - mattered little in America's Gilded Age, an era that celebrated the swashbuckling industrialist who acquired fortunes and social standing through gumption and enterprise. If Europe possessed the most prized antiquities, then by god America would find its own ancient treasures, even if it meant snatching an entire island's worth from under the nose of the British Museum!

Of course, Cesnola's exploits would eventually catch up with him, with the museum director weathering accusations of heavy-handed restoration, artifact laundering, and even outright fraud. But that scandal lay in the future. For now, New York's new temple of culture had staked its reputation on the artistic and educational value of Cypriot antiquities. By pioneering the wholesale acquisition of archaeological artifacts, the Metropolitan set a precedent that would guide (and sometimes bedevil) America's museums well into the 20th century.

Love them or hate them, Cesnola's Cypriot sculptures had transformed a modest New York institution into a news-making powerhouse whose collections could go head-to-head with those of Paris and London. A relic of America's complex relationship with the classical past, these "shocking bad" statues and pots helped build one of the world's great encyclopedic museums. Even if New Yorkers of the 1870s didn't quite know what to make of them!