Hellenistic bronze sculptures at the Metropolitan Museum: from gods to grotesques: among the treasures of the Metropolitan's new Greek and Roman galleries is the finest collection of Hellenistic bronzes in North America. Sean Hemingway introduces a selection of these masterpieces, which have appealed strongly to collectors from ancient times to the present day

The opening of the Metropolitan Museum's new Hellenistic and Roman galleries, after years of preparation, has returned to view one of the premier collections of Hellenistic and Roman art in the world. A particular strength of the holdings of Hellenistic art is bronze sculpture. It is worth remembering that in the 18th and 19th centuries, and for most of the 20th century, the Hellenistic period was viewed as a time of artistic decline after the preceding golden age of Classical Greece. Johannn Joachim Winckelmann famously wrote in 1764 about ancient Greek art, "The period which art was in its highest bloom was not of long duration; from the age of Pericles until the death of Alexander at which time the glory of art began to diminish', (1) This notion of the decadence and decay of Greek art and architecture in Hellenistic times, which fingered long in scholarship, was a view that was shared, it seems, by ancient Roman writers, who had little to say about Hellenistic artists but praised the work of Greek bronze sculptors of the 5th and 4th centuries BC. A surge in scholarly study over the past several decades has significantly revised this simplistic analysis and led to a more nuanced appreciation of Hellenistic art and its richly diverse stylistic development. (2) It is thanks to the Metropolitans mission as an encyclopaedic art museum, and to the vision of its successive directors and trustees, as well as to the connoisseurship of its curators of Greek and Roman art, that the institution acquired, primarily through purchase, but also by gift and bequest, such a fine collection of Hellenistic bronzes in the first century of the museum's history, when Hellenistic art was not fashionable? Presented here is a selection of masterworks in bronze, now on display in the new galleries, from icons of Hellenistic art such as The Baker Dancer (Fig. 2) and the sleeping Eros (Fig. 1) to less well-known works that demonstrate the depth and breadth of Greek sculptors' achievements in the three centuries following Alexander the Great's unparalleled conquest of much of the ancient world.

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With Alexander's defeat of the Persian king Darius in 331 BC, the lands under his control stretched from Greece and Asia Minor through Egypt and the Near East to India. His empire lasted nine short years but the many kingdoms that were established by Alexander's successors continued for centuries, and supported on many levels flourishing industries of artists and craftsmen, the most important of whom were associated with the royal courts. As a result of the unprecedented contact with cultures far and wide, Greek culture and its arts were disseminated across the known world, and Greek artistic styles were exposed to a host of new exotic influences. The statuette of a veiled and masked dancer (Fig. 2), formerly owned by the New York philanthropist Walter Baker, conveys the immediacy that is characteristic of the finest Hellenistic bronze sculpture. (4) Her carefully orchestrated movement is portrayed exclusively through the layers of her dress as she performs a kind of dance of the seven veils. The sculptor achieved this delicate layered effect by means of a very thick casting. (5)

The sculpture's realistic style and elegant subject have a remarkably modern appeal, yet this exquisite bronze is very much a product of its time and place, that is Alexandria in the first part of the 3rd century BC. This dancing figure has been convincingly associated with the professional entertainers for which the city was famous in antiquity?

The aesthetic impulse of the ancient Greeks was not always geared toward evoking the ideal form so evident in sculpture of the Classical period. During the Hellenistic era, artists and their patrons took a new interest in genre studies of ordinary people, young and old, and at the fringes of society, something that had not occurred before to any significant degree. Alexandria was a leading centre for the development of this trend in the 3rd century BC, but many other artistic centres, particularly Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor, also produced such works. This trend was sometimes taken to an extreme, producing one of the most visually disturbing classes of ancient Greek sculpture, the group of small statuettes, primarily of bronze or terracotta, with distorted bodies and gruesome faces known today as grotesques. (7) They served a variety of functions in Hellenistic society and are not always easy to interpret. Some are demonstrably pathological studies of human deformity that, as in a group of works from Smyrna, have been linked to ancient medical and healing centres. These grotesques may also have served an apotropaic function, to protect their owners from evil and sickness. Others are humorous in nature and clearly represent actors called mimes, whose slapstick dramas emphasised buffoonery and obscenity. A likely example of the latter is a small statuette known as The Capponi Grotesque (Fig. 3), after its 18th-century Italian owner. (8) The artist has combined inlaid details, such as blackened silver for the hair and silver for the eyes, and careful modelling to create a singularly memorable, strange little figure. The use of metal inlays became popular in Hellenistic times as a way to add vitality to bronze sculptures.