In those days the whole Getty museum was housed in the replica Villa dei Papyri. Then they built a big new museum for most of the treasures, and left the Greek and Roman antiquities in the Villa. This must mean that there's loads more space for Classical exhibits now, so this news item is quite exciting.
Getty Museum Reopens Villa Amid Controversy
By Mike O'Sullivan
Los Angeles
26 January 2006
VOA News
After eight years of renovation, the Getty Museum will reopen its antiquities museum Saturday in a replica Roman villa on the California coastline. The opening comes at the end of a difficult year for the West Coast U.S. art center.
After receiving a $275 million upgrade, the Getty Villa will again welcome visitors to its spectacular site in Malibu, above the Pacific Ocean. The building was conceived by the late oil billionaire J. Paul Getty and first opened its doors in 1974. Karol Wight, the Getty's acting curator of antiquities, says it was modeled on the first-century Roman Villa Dei Papiri, which was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79.
"What was known of the structure at the time this museum was built was only the ground plan. So all of the architectural details that you see, including mosaic floors, column capitals, things like that, those were all borrowed from other buildings in Pompeii and Herculaneum to finish out the details," she said.
The villa is a square building surrounding an open garden, with another large garden on its south side.
The museum has one of the finest collections of Greek, Roman and Etruscan art in the United States, from bronze implements and finely crafted gold and silver tableware to heroic marble statues. Wight says all are important art works.
"There's a wonderful Roman statue, the Lansdowne Herakles. That's a Roman depiction of the greatest of the Greek heroes, Hercules, as he was known to the Romans. And it is an extremely important piece for art historians because it was discovered in the 1790s, and had an immediate effect on the understanding of what Greek and Roman art was at the time," she said.
The Getty continues its research into the classical world in its on-site laboratory.
More here.
