Flash Talk | Discarded, Discovered, Stolen, and Recovered: The Turbulent Life of a Marble Statuette from Carthage

In 1977, a team from the University of Michigan working at Carthage in Tunisia discovered 17 fragments of a marble statuette of Ganymede and the Eagle mixed in with kitchen debris in a cistern below an elite house, the House of the Greek Charioteers. As a young curator specializing in Roman art at the Kelsey Museum, Professor Gazda was given the task of publishing the statuette. In her article, which appeared in 1981 alongside the excavation reports, she dated the statuette to the late antique period based on its style, archaeological findspot, and cultural context in Carthage of the period of St. Augustine.

Although her conclusion was surprising at the time, since then, the Ganymede has appeared regularly in scholarship on late antique art. Then, in 2013, the statuette was stolen from the museum that U-M’s team had built at the archeological site and where the Ganymede had served as the centerpiece. Thanks to Interpol, the statuette was recovered in 2017. Now, after 40-plus years, Professor Gazda is working on another article in which she assesses the influence of the Carthage Ganymede on the field of late antique art history and presents an object biography of the changing meaning and value of the statuette from antiquity to the present day. Her talk will focus on her current research.

Kelsey Museum Flash Talks are 15-minute Zoom lectures by Kelsey curators, staff members, researchers, graduate students, and guests talking about their recent research or current projects. Each presentation is followed by 15 minutes of Q&A. Flash Talks are free and open to all visitors. They take place at noon on the first Friday of every month.

To register for this event, visit https://myumi.ch/G4kdJ.