The greatest Cypriot show in Florida: Ringling Museum opens its first permanent ancient-art gallery
The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, is opening its first permanent ancient-art gallery this weekend, nearly a century after John Ringling acquired around 3,300 pieces of ancient Mediterranean art from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1928. The collection, which includes Cypriot artifacts from the Early Bronze Age to the Hellenistic period, had largely remained in storage due to the 1929 stock-market crash and Ringling's death in 1936. Guest curator Joanna S. Smith and chief curator Sarah Cartwright spent a decade on conservation and research, recontextualizing objects originally collected by Luigi Palma di Cesnola, the Met's first director, who excavated in Cyprus from 1865 to 1876.