The Sheila Variations

The new exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum

... entitled "Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past" - reviewed by Victor Davis Hanson in The New Criterion, proving once again why I dig that man so much.

There is a rich diversity in the show—and Professors Oakley and Neils are to be congratulated for the selection of vases, metal jewelry, stone and terracotta sculpture, and wood and paper artifacts that leave us with an appreciation that Hellenic excellence in art spanned four or five centuries and was found throughout the Greek-speaking Mediterranean.

A final surprise of the exhibition is that the most moving everyday scenes and toys seem to be from Boeotia—the ancient equivalent of our own rural heartland. If we naturally associate sophisticated Greek art only with Athens and to a lesser extent with Corinth and Italy, we forget that thousands of other Greeks in the shadows in places like the perennially maligned Boeotia were just as artistically adept, and perhaps possessed an eye for the everyday things that matter but are forgotten by their more heralded urban counterparts. And that seems yet another lesson for us as well—that there is plenty of art and culture beyond our own triangle of New York, Washington, and Los Angeles that sees what is important in life in pretty much the same way as did these rural Greeks.