‘Discovering Greece and Rome in Gotham’

     
I really need to pay closer attention to the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art. Located just a mile north of Masonic Hall, the ICAA offers great events, to wit:

Classical New York:

Discovering Greece and Rome

in Gotham

Thursday, September 27

6:30 to 8:30

20 West 44th Street, first floor

Register here

During the rise of New York from the capital of an upstart nation to a global metropolis, the visual language of Greek and Roman antiquity played a formative role in the development of the city’s art and architecture. Join Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis, Matthew McGowan, and Francis Morrone, three of the authors of the upcoming book Classical New York: Discovering Greece and Rome in Gotham (Fordham University Press), for an evening of interdisciplinary exploration of New York City’s classical roots.

Classical New York examines the influence of Greco-Roman thought and design from the Greek Revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through the late-nineteenth-century American Renaissance and Beaux Arts period and into the twentieth century’s Art Deco. At every juncture, New Yorkers looked to the classical past for knowledge and inspiration in seeking out new ways to cultivate a civic identity, to design their buildings and monuments, and to structure their public and private spaces.

Following an introduction to classical reception and its importance in New York City, the three authors will speak on their papers from Classical New York:

Fordham University Press

• Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis’s “The Gould Memorial Library and Hall of Fame: Reinterpreting the Pantheon in the Bronx”

• Matthew McGowan’s “In Ancient and Permanent Language: Artful Dialogue in the Latin Inscriptions of New York City”

• Francis Morrone’s “The Custom House of 1833-42: A Greek Revival Building in Context.”

Copies of Classical New York: Discovering Greece and Rome in Gotham will be available for purchase following the event.

Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis is Assistant Professor and Acting Executive Officer of the M.A. Program in Liberal Studies (MALS) and director of the MALS track Archaeology of the Classical, Late Antique, and Islamic Worlds at the City University of New York. She majored in history, archaeology, and classics at Cornell University, where she graduated summa cum laude, and she earned her master’s and doctoral degrees in archaeology at Oxford University. She has taught at Oxford and Royal Holloway–University of London. Macaulay-Lewis is the editor or author of five books, including the 2017 work Housing the New Romans: Architectural Reception and Classical Style in the Modern World, and the author of over a dozen articles on ancient Roman and Islamic gardens and architecture.

Matthew McGowan is Associate Professor and Chair of Classics at Fordham University. He is interested in Roman poetry, ancient scholarship, and classical reception. He has published broadly on a variety of Greek and Latin topics and is the author of Ovid in Exile: Power and Poetic Redress in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto (Brill, 2009). Alongside editing Classical New York, he is compiling a guide to the Greek and Latin inscriptions of New York City. He teaches a wide range of courses, from classical myth to Latin prose composition, and has instituted the spoken Latin table at the Rose Hill campus. He was President of the New York Classical Club (2009-15) and is now Vice President for Communications and Outreach for the Society for Classical Studies.

Francis Morrone is an architectural historian and the author of eleven books including Guide to New York City Urban Landscapes (W.W. Norton, 2013); The New York Public Library: The Architecture and Decoration of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (with Henry Hope Reed, W.W. Norton, 2011); and architectural guidebooks to Philadelphia and Brooklyn. As a historic preservation consultant he has written countless building histories and neighborhood surveys in New York and beyond. He worked as an art and architecture critic for the New York Sun. Collectively, his work represents one of the most comprehensive bodies of research on the built history of New York City.

The Gould Memorial Library and Hall of Fame. My alma mater’s previous library in the Bronx. Only a tiny piece of it was relocated to Washington Square, where the current library stands. Bobst Library looks...ah, different.

     

‘Tisha B’av 5774’

     
“For the Lord your God is a merciful God; He will not let you loose or destroy you; neither will He forget the covenant of your fathers, which He swore to them.”

Lamentations 4:31

Courtesy Aish

It must be daylight still somewhere, so we are in the final hours of Tisha B’av of 5774, the Jewish commemoration of the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem; the former—King Solomon’s Temple—was sacked by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, and the latter destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. It is a sad day of fasting and observance among Jews for obvious reasons.

Within fifteen years of the Romans’ destruction of Jerusalem, the Arch of Titus, located near the Forum, was unveiled to the Roman citizens. One of its decorative marble relief panels depicts victorious Romans carrying plunder from the Temple, including its menorah, and possibly the Ark itself. Whether this art is journalistic accuracy or grandiose sycophancy or a little of both remains unknown.