Join us as Professor Jim Higginbotham leads a noon-time tour of the exhibition “Flora et Fauna: Nature in Ancient Mediterranean Art and Culture” at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Professor Higginbotham, Associate Professor of Classics on the Henry Johnson Professorship Fund and Associate Curator for the Ancient Collection at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, will share insights into this unique display of the museum’s collection.
The exhibition features works from the Museum’s collection spanning nearly two thousand years and examines how ancient Mediterranean societies understood and depicted the natural world. Illustrations of nature and local environments came to define the identities of many cultures, serving as symbols, decorative designs, and stand-ins for gods. Nature also inspired the imagination to create exotic animals and plants that became part of ancient mythologies. This exhibition explores how flora and fauna sustained societies and were passed both literally, through cultivated plants, pets, and livestock, and figuratively, through the development of pictorial imagery, from one culture to another.
Free and open to the public; no registration required. The tour will begin at noon in the Museum’s entryway Pavilion. Presented by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.
Image: “Red-Figure Fish Plate,” Attributed to the “Perrone-Phrixos” group, Apulian, ca. 360–320 BCE, clay. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. Museum Purchase, Adela Wood Smith Trust, 2018.1
Looking to stay in the loop on all the exciting happenings in Brunswick?.