Ugly Object of the Month – April | Kelsey Museum

https://kelseymuseum.wordpress.com/2016/04/06/ugly-object-of-the-month-april/
cperson01 wrote:

BY SUZANNE DAVIS, Curator for Conservation, Kelsey Museum of Archaeology

The Kelsey Museum's current special exhibit – Leisure and Luxury in the Age of Nero – is full of insanely gorgeous objects from the Villas of Oplontis near Pompeii. But guess what? The Kelsey has a few objects on view in this exhibit, too, and you probably won't be surprised to learn that some of them are, you know, not insanely gorgeous.

Polished architectural facing fragment. KM 29617.

This month's ugly object is a marble sample – basically, a polished rock – and it's on view in a section of the exhibit that demonstrates how the villas' surfaces were adorned with decorative stones. You see the object here before conservation treatment to remove the collector's label. The label – which we saved, of course – says: From the Great Theater at Ephesus, Sept 6^th 1867.

It was collected and given to the Kelsey by James D. Candler, a businessman, builder, and traveler who was based in Detroit in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

This stone sample and others like it have been the focus of recent research at the Kelsey. IPCAA alumnae Leah Long and Lynley McAlpine, UM Professor and Kelsey Curator Elaine Gazda, and University of Akron emeritus professor Clayton Fant have been studying the Kelsey's stone samples, in part to see if analytical techniques like stable isotope analysis can connect samples like this one to their sources and buildings of origin.

Filed under: Conservation, Exhibitions, Ugly Object