Appeal to the Great Spirit
So on a whim I ended up going to the Museum of Fine Arts yesterday. I decided to go mostly because I have a Hellenistic Art and Culture final exam coming up (in a couple of hours from now, actually) and I wanted to see if there was anything of interest to me at the museum. Turns out there isn’t. I don’t know if it’s because the Alexander/Hellenistic stuff is packed away due to the renovations or if it’s because they don’t have any in the first place. I basically found some coins but that was about it. Even the Ptolemies were under-represented. Oh well.
The trip wasn’t a bust though. I got to see the El Greco to Velázquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III exhibt I had been itching to see. The works were extraordinary and most of them quite massive in size. I really liked El Greco’s pieces. And the collections of paintings of St. Francis were quite moving. I got a nice little postcard of El Greco’s Annunciation that’s hanging on my wall now. I’ll probably be going back in a couple of weeks when my family is here for graduation. When I go back I plan to rent one of those guide headphones so I can hear more about the background of each painting. And hopefully on my next visit the gallery won’t be overwhelmed with noisy high school brats who couldn’t give a shit about being there.
You’re not allowed to take photos of the special exhibits, but I got some shots from my explorations of the rest of the museum. Some of them are kind of blurry. The MFA doesn’t allow flash photography or tripods, so I had to make due with a bumped up ISO/Exposure and some careful breathing. You can find the images on my Flickr.
One thing that I saw there that really excited me was this:
It was an actual tauroctony! “Mithras slaying the bull.” You see, my senior capstone involved researching the influence of Roman sun-cults on early Christian images and practices. The Mysteries of Mithras constituted a bulk of what I read up on, along with Elagabalus’ and Aurelian’s imperial cults of Sol Invictus. The tauroctony is the centerpiece of any mithraeum, the Mithras cult’s place of worship, and it is thought to constitute the whole dogma of the cult itself- but we don’t know exactly what it means because literary attestation is practically nil. So basically scholars will guess and argue about what the tauroctony really means until something explaining it is found. The MFA’s tauroctony is more simplistic than they can be, lacking in some of the array of zodiac symbolism found on other examples - not to mention poor Mithras is missing his head - but it a fine example none the less. I was so happy to see it!
Originally published at glitzy bad. You can comment here or there.