Ancient sculpture attracts attention

“Seleucia” has seen better days. One of her eyes is missing, as well as her entire body, which somehow became detached from her alabaster and stucco head at some point during the past 2,000 years of her existence.

No matter. She’s still quite sought after. So much so that Leah Niederstadt, Wheaton assistant professor of museum studies/art history and permanent collection curator, carefully carried the ancient sculpture head on a trip in May. She personally delivered it to the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan at the request of museum officials seeking to borrow it from Wheaton’s permanent collection. The loan is for at least five years, with the possibility of renewal.

According to the museum’s curator Margaret Cool Root, the head will be a linchpin piece for an installation exhibition marking the opening of a newly constructed museum wing this month. It will be featured in a gallery that highlights many aspects of excavations that took place at Seleucia-on-the-Tigris between 1927 and 1937. Seleucia was a Hellenistic capital in what is now modern-day Iraq.

“This is interesting,” said Niederstadt, “because there are many amazing objects in our collection that are used a great deal by the Wheaton community, but aren’t known outside of the campus. So this is an opportunity for people to see what we have in the collection. And it is a beautiful little piece and in good physical condition, which is unusual to find.”

The head, which is small enough to fit into the palm of a hand, was excavated in 1931.

The excavations were conducted by the University of Michigan and co-sponsored by the Toledo Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art. While the University of Michigan retained a large portion of finds from Seleucia, the Toledo Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art each received small allocations reflecting their financial assistance to the expedition. A selection of some of the most remarkable and unique finds remained in Baghdad. The exhibition, which opened November 1, brings together the best of the collections in the United States.

“Of the several heads for attachment to statuettes that came to the U.S. institutions, the Wheaton head is the most visually striking; it is of the highest quality, and it boasts the best preservation,” said Root. “For these reasons alone, the Kelsey Museum was eager to incorporate it into our displays—reuniting significant artifacts from the excavations in one contextualized presentation.”

The Seleucia head was given to Wheaton in 1949 by the then director of the Toledo Museum as a gift in honor of Wilhelmina Van Ingen Elarth, an associate professor of history and art who taught at Wheaton from 1935 to 1946. She had previously worked at the University of Michigan and published Figurines from Seleucia on the Tigris in 1939, a copy of which is in the Wheaton archives.

Kelsey Museum officials had been keenly interested in getting the Seleucia head to figure out whether it matched a torso in the collection at the Toledo Museum of Art. Alas, it does not. Yet it is still fascinating.

“The Wheaton head was probably made 100 years or more before its final deposition,” said Root. “It was found as debris that had been swept up in the brickwork of a room dating to the latest level of the site—between A.D. 115 and 227…. A beautiful antiquity such as the Wheaton head would normally be viewed only as an isolated object of art on a pedestal in a museum gallery. In the Kelsey Museum display it will, however, be placed within a visual context of an amazing array of things found within the brickwork of Seleucia.”