Yale University Art Gallery Photo
Roman shield with the traces of scenes from the Iliad.
Given the human carnage of recent ISIS and ISIS-inspired attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, it’s all too easy to forget that this group’s vicious and profit-oriented pillaging continues unabated at the historical site of Dura Europos, in Syria.
An illuminating reminder of what’s at stake is on view at Yale University’s Whitney Humanities Center, in a small exhibition called “Painting in Time: Discovery, Analysis, and Interpretation of a Roman Shield from Dura-Europos.”
Curated by Sarah Norvell, “Painting in Time” has as its centerpiece a study of a rare oval-shaped wooden Roman soldier’s shield from Dura-Europos, with traces of paint still on it. The shield, along with two others, all in fragments and extremely fragile, have been in the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery since the 1930s, when the university took part in the excavations.
It runs through Friday at the center, at Wall Street near Church.
(Click here for a story back in May, when the Independent visited the Dura-Europos exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery, at the time ISIS first arrived to occupy the site in Syria.)
Curved scutum, or Roman war shield.
Norvell, who graduated from Yale in 2015 and is now continuing her studies at Oxford University in England, made some scholarly discoveries, or educated guesses, about the damaged-by-time and fragile shield in question. Rereading Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid, and studying the iconography shield decoration in general, she reattributed the identification of a figure depicted on the shield — from Cassandra, the daughter of Troy’s King Priam, to, more likely, Helen. Bringing together the science of conservation with the insights of literary and classics analysis, she also identified pigments in the paint on the shield as likely coming from a plant native to Syria, which makes geographical sense.
Her work — Norvell had an internship in conservation at the Yale University Art Gallery — also helped expand the way scholars and technical experts think about how the Romans painted on wood.
Aerial view of site at the time of the 1930 excavations.
The discovery of more such items in the Dura-Europos site is being undermined by ISIS’s and other groups’ extensive and seemingly systematic looting, the illegal profits from which have helped to fund ISIS’s murderous campaigns.
As the exhibition’s informative brochure copy reads, “it may never be known what exactly has been lost. With these considerations in mind, the exhibit also seeks to highlight the current state of the Dura-Europos site under this destructive regime.” Which makes touching, almost poignant, the new insights that Norvell and her mentors and colleagues have teased from the artifacts in their care. For example, we learn that, precisely because of their decoration, shape, and thinness, the shields were likely used not in battle, but more for show in military parades.
Watercolor painting of one shield by Herbert Gute, in 1935.
The exhibition at the Whitney Humanities Center contains no original objects. Rather, it is a record of the work, with large photographs and wall labels that explain the steps, the process, the results, and the urgency of the context. If you’re looking for the artifacts themselves, the show directs you to see fragments of the original, along with a fabulous scutum, or true battle shield, as well as equine armor, all on view in the Dura-Europos exhibition room on the street level at the Yale University Art Gallery.
There also on view are Palmyrene funerary sculptures, of the kind that ISIS has already destroyed.
There are also second- and third-century artifacts from store-front churches and even a modest synagogue, with famous ceiling decorations, on view, all from the multicultural crossroads that was Dura-Europos.
All of which remind you, along with these new insights about the oval shield, that, yes, war has always been with us — and ironically, its results may have contributed to the desert-preservation of these items.
Yet above all, you sense how much of the human record, both spotty and noble, is at this moment also at supreme risk.
“Painting in Time: Discovery, Analysis, and Interpretation of a Roman Shield from Dura-Europos” runs at the Gallery at the Whitney, at the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St., through Dec. 18. Click here for more information.
