Summary
Wilde credits Sir Charles Newton with bringing treasures out of the Museum's grimy vaults, and says the new room will touch even the Philistine, since it shows what the Greeks and Romans thought about death. Most of the pieces are common tombstones, made in days when every handicraft was an art. The finest are two stelai from Athens of young athletes, one handing his strigil to his slave. Others show two ladies of Smyrna honoured with crowns, a doctor examining a boy with indigestion, and Xanthippus holding the model of a foot. A stele from Rhodes shows a horseman taking leave of his wife, who is held back by a child. Parting, Wilde says, is the central motive of Greek funeral art. Roman tombs instead give vigorous, realistic and often very ugly portraits, such as the couple Aphrodisius and Atilia, whose stone was found in the Thames.
The room also holds Roman decorative art. Wilde singles out a marriage relief in which Juno Pronuba joins the hands of a young noble and a stately lady, with the grace of Perugino and Raphael, and friezes of children, Muses, racing cupids and Amazons, from which he says it is easy to see whence the Renaissance sprang. He congratulates Newton and Mr. Murray, but names works still in the vaults, among them a Cupid and Psyche relief, the cast of the Lion of Chæronea and a portrait of a Roman slave, and calls the parsimony that leaves them there a public vice.