Italy Before Rome

THE NEW CRITERION, October 2023

Italy before Rome

On Greek colonies, Etruscan tombs & Italian origins.

The landing began eighty years ago at one minute past midnight. Loudspeakers on the American troopships approaching the coast of Italy gave the signal. In the first moments of September 9, 1943—an earlier D-Day of the Second World War, this one of Operation Avalanche—soldiers climbed over the gunwales and down the nets into their landing crafts. Their destination was the fortified beach at Paestum, a town in Campania along the sandy coast twenty-five miles south of Salerno.

Italy had surrendered to the Allies just a day before, but Nazi forces were dug in. The amphibious assault around the ankle of Italy was meant to free the boot of what was now German-occupied territory. Paestum was to serve as one of the beachheads for the American and British campaign north and west up the peninsula while isolating German troops to the south. By enabling the eventual capture of Naples and then Rome and beyond, the landing was another step in the liberation of Italy and the slow march on Germany; Operation Overlord and the Allied landing at Normandy were still nine months off.

At H-Hour—three-thirty in the morning—the landing crafts, or those that were able to find their way in the night, came together three miles out to sea. They then made their final approach towards the dark beach.

“Come on in and give up!” a German voice blared from loudspeakers on shore. “We have you covered.”

To achieve the element of surprise, the American generals had decided not to bomb the Tyrrhenian coastline leading up to the landing. A British diversionary assault then tried to draw German forces out of the area. The deceptions proved counterproductive. The waters were mined. The Paestum beach was defended with gun emplacements and wire. Eight divisions from the German Tenth Army, under the command of Heinrich von Vietinghoff, were stationed to counter the American assault. Against artillery, aerial, sniper, and machine gunfire, and a counterattack from the Sixteenth Panzer Division that nearly pushed them back into the sea, American forces stormed the beaches and fought to reach assembly points inland.

Photograph: Photographer unknown, National Archives, Washington D.C. 

As supplies and personnel began moving in from the beachheads, a Negro unit from Headquarters Company, 480th Port Battalion, established a temporary office in the ruins of a Greek temple just off the beach. These U.S. signal-corps soldiers unloaded their portable equipment and began their relay work among the ruins of what we now call the Temple of Hera II. They sat on wooden crates and rested their helmets and canteens atop their fold-out desks and typewriter boxes.

On September 22, an army photographer came upon their bivouac and recorded their field office. “A company of men has set up its office between the columns (Doric) of an ancient Greek temple of Neptune, built about 700 B.C.,” reads the caption on photograph 111-SC-181588, now in the National Archives. As the signal officers worked in a line at their makeshift desks on the temple platform, the scene of ancient and modern, of new arrivals communing with settled stones, became one of the more iconic photographs of the Second World War. Here were segregated American soldiers fighting the German Wehr-macht from a Greek temple on Italian soil. The uncanny confluence served as a reminder that the Apennine Peninsula has long been contested by waves of warring nations. There was even an Italy before Rome.

Twenty-five hundred years before, in this low tidal area near the mouth of the Sele River, ancient Greek mariners had created their own Italian beachhead at the same spot. They called their outpost Poseidonia, after the ocean god Poseidon. They carved out streets and houses and built a row of temples out of the local iron-rich stone, which, unlike their native Greek marble, turned red in the salt air.

Human settlement here dates back to the Stone Age. The nearby rivers, fed by steep mountains to the east, produce a fertile floodplain. The Greek colony was founded in the mid-seventh century B.C., one in that constellation of Hellenic settlements the Romans later called Magna Graecia. But this was still some fifty years before the village of Rome—then just a small settlement clinging to a handful of rises above the Tiber River—has drained the land for its Forum between the Capitoline and Palatine Hills.

At the time, the Etruscans, competitors and occasional overlords of the Latin tribes, were gaining power in the area. This Greek outpost, like the American beachhead, was intended to forestall enemy expansion and protect friendly settlements to the south. Over the next few hundred years after its founding, the town fell to the Italic Lucanians, then returned to the Greeks, then the Lucanians again. In 273 B.C. Poseidonia finally succumbed to the expanding dominion of Rome. The Romans renamed it Paestum. They built their forum, replacing the Greek agora or marketplace at the center of town, and laid down their Roman roads around the Greek constructions.

The Great Temple at Paestum, 1897. Photograph: Photographer unknown, New York Public Library.

The town lasted another thousand years, well into the Christian era, before malarial swamps finally reclaimed it. From the middle ages until the nineteenth century, when the Sele River was re-channeled and the area re-drained, the abandoned settlement remained overgrown, even dangerous to visit. The site was only excavated starting in 1907, a process that is still ongoing. Paestum’s long-abandoned state means that its two monumental temples dating from the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., at first thought to honor Poseidon/Neptune but now believed to be dedicated to the goddess Hera/Juno, are some of the best preserved ancient Greek structures in the world. A smaller third temple, dedicated to Athena and dating from the same era, also stands today.

Acentury ago, in the late 1920s, D. H. Lawrence toured his own pre-Roman sites with his American friend Earl Brewster, a painter and a scholar of Buddhism. Lawrence then wrote a paean to the pre-Roman people in “Etruscan Places,” an essay first published along with his other Italian travel writing in 1932, two years after his death.

The fate of Rome’s closest neighbors—who were among its earliest conquests—has long intrigued artists and perplexed historians. Michelangelo sketched the Etruscan tombs at Tarquinia. Piranesi composed an etching based on the Etruscan ruins at Chiusi. Robert Adam decorated the state dressing room of West London’s Osterley Park estate in Etruscan-style fresco. Johann Joachim Winckelmann made a study of Etruscan civilization along with the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. Meanwhile the Society of the Dilettanti in London discussed the Etruscans’ lack of facial hair as compared to the Greeks—a habit of grooming, they surmised, that the Etruscans must have passed down to the Latins.

D.H. Lawrence beneath an olive tree at Villa Mirenda, San Polo Mosciano, ca. 1926–27. Manuscripts and Special Collections, The University of Nottingham. Photograph: Photographer unknown.

Veii, a southern town of Etruria just ten miles north of Rome, supposedly fell to the Roman Republic in 396 B.C. after a ten-year siege. Despite their proximity to Rome, the Etruscans spoke a language that was non-Indo-European, like Hungarian or Basque, and which today remains largely elusive. Their origins have been debated since ancient times; the eyewitness records of Rome’s own early interactions with Etruria’s hilltop settlements may have been destroyed in Brennus’s Gallic sack of Rome in 387 B.C. We do not know for certain how Etruria came to mix with its Latin neighbors to the south. Before the establishment of the Roman Republic in 509 B.C., three of Rome’s seven ancient kings—Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius, and Lucius Tarquinius Superbus—were supposedly Etruscan. The rape of Lucretia by Sextus Tarquinius, the Tarquin prince, precipitated the Roman overthrow of the Etruscan monarchy. As told by Livy and recounted by Ovid, the legend of Lucretia’s rape and suicide was used in ancient times to justify the Etruscans’ demise and has been widely depicted in Western art since the Renaissance, taken up by Shakespeare, Titian, and Benjamin Britten, among many others.

What mainly remains of Etruria itself are its tombs, which are open to exploration today much as D. H. Lawrence found them in the 1920s (I first visited the sites some thirty years ago as an undergraduate). These necropoli are indeed “cities of the dead.” The Etruscans carved, built, and painted their tumuli as second homes, hillside condominiums for the afterlife. To complicate the historical record, some of their decorations were Greek-inspired if not Greek-made—a reflection of Near Eastern influences under Etruria’s “orientalizing” period, which reached a high point in the seventh century B.C. While it was long thought that these tombs depicting the characters of Greek myth revealed the Greek ancestry of the Etruscans, archaeological consensus now links the Etruscans to Italy’s Iron Age Villanovans. Here are central Italy’s aborigines—ab origine, Latin for “from the beginning.”

In “Etruscan Places,” Lawrence took up the history of these ancient people in part to slight their Roman successors—and, by extension, the Italian fascists drawing their authority at the time from classical antiquity, following Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922.

Lawrence was not the only writer of his time to use Etruria’s ancient backdrops for modern commentary. In “Roman Fever,” her sensational short story first published in Liberty magazine in 1934, Edith Wharton alludes to Italian aviators flying two American daughters from Rome to Tarquinia for a fraught moonlit tour of the site. What distinguishes Lawrence’s writing is his first-person account of the Etruscan tombs of Cerveteri, Tarquinia, Vulci, and Volterra, intermixed with grand pronouncements and often absurd speculation. As Lawrence began:

The Etruscans, as everyone knows, were the people who occupied the middle of Italy in early Roman days, and whom the Romans, in their usual neighborly fashion, wiped out entirely in order to make room for Rome with a very big R. They couldn’t have wiped them all out, there were too many of them. But they did wipe out the Etruscan existence as a nation and a people. However, this seems to be the inevitable result of expansion with a big E, which is the sole raison d’être of people like the Romans.

In a certain way, Lawrence’s literary achievement was his ability to write, even in his twilight years, like a petulant adolescent. His analysis may be overblown. He also committed the sin of reading contemporary politics into historical events. His rhetorical deployment of the “Etruscans” could be just as facile as Il Duce’s “Romans.” At the same time, what makes his Italian travel writing compelling is the often inadvertent humor of this celebrity-radical raiding tombs among the poor paesani. “Impossible to leave an unlocked small hold-all at the station,” he bemoans at one point, when the local station attendant at Palo refuses to hold on to his luggage for him. “B. and I are two very quiet-mannered harmless men,” he elsewhere laments, when a fourteen-year-old child declines to take these two strangers to the tombs at Cerveteri: “But that first boy could not have borne to go alone with us. Not alone!” “The Etruscans had a passion for music, and an inner carelessness the modern Italians have lost,” he gathers upon seeing the painted tombs of Tarquinia. “It is different now. The drab peasants, muffled in ugly clothing, straggle in across the waste bit of space, and trail home, songless and meaningless.”

Writing an appreciation of the book for The Washington Post two years ago, Walter Nicklin maintained that Lawrence “seamlessly mixes closely observed, naturalistic details with the kind of inward reflections found in essays and memoirs. Adding spice to the mix, he never feared to offend with his sharp historical analysis sprinkled with cultural and social criticisms.”

At Cerveteri, for example, with its cylindrical mausolea carved out of the bedrock, Lawrence wrote of “the natural beauty of proportion of the phallic consciousness, contrasted with the more studied or ecstatic proportion of the mental and spiritual Consciousness we are accustomed to.” The Romans, meanwhile, “hated the phallus and the ark [womb], because they wanted empire and dominion and, above all, riches: social gain. You cannot dance gaily to the double flute and at the same time conquer nations or rake in large sums of money.”

Achilles ambushing Troilus (on horseback) Etruscan fresco, Tomb of the Bulls, Tarquinia. Photograph: Mary Harrsch.

Encountering the tomb figures of Tarquinia, Lawence likened the “sun painted” Etruscans to “Red Indians” and remarked on the visceral effect of vermillion among animistic people: “They know the gods in their very finger-tips.” It was Greek skepticism and Greek rationalism, Lawrence deduced, that “more or less took the place of the old Etruscan symbolic thought.” Finally, under Roman rule, the “Etruscan princes became fat and inert. . . . The Etruscan people became expressionless and meaningless.” He concluded: “For all of the Italian people that ever lived, the Etruscans were surely the least Roman. Just as, of all the people that ever rose up in Italy, the Romans of ancient Rome were surely the most un-Italian, judging from the natives of to-day.”

What is perhaps most telling about Etruscan tombs is how varied they could be from town to town, something Lawrence rightly noted. Some were carved into the hillside. Others were constructed in mushroom-shaped mounds. Inhumation was practiced in one place while cremation was common in another. Lawrence observed how

the Etruscans carried out perfectly what seems to be the Italian instinct: to have single, independent cities, with a certain surrounding territory, each district speaking its own dialect and feeling at home in its own little capital, yet the whole confederacy of city-states loosely linked together by a common religion and a more-or-less common interest.

To follow on Lawrence’s point, it was this regional variation that ran counter to the Roman mindset, which went on to express its astonishing power by laying down the same roads and aqueducts and temples from Africa to Judea to Britain to the Caspian Sea. Latin legend has long held that the Romans emerged from something beyond the native Italic. This was the story most famously expressed in the twelve books of Virgil’s Aeneid, connecting Aeneas’s escape from the destruction of Troy to the founding of Rome and even to the ancestry of the Caesars.

As it happens, clay figurines depicting the story of Aeneas carrying his father Anchises on his back out of Troy have been discovered in Veii. Whether these figures date from before or after Rome’s conquest of the town in 396 B.C. remains an open question. It could be that the Aeneas myth reached Rome through Etruria, or that both the Latins and the Etruscans received it from Greek sources, or that the story in fact reveals some ancestral Hellenic connection between one group or another. It could also be that the origin myth of the Latins was just that, a myth, and that the Latin stock was just as proto-Villanovan as that of the Etruscans.

What matters is that the descendants of one of these Latin settlements managed to dominate the others, and in short order the rest of the Western world. Here is a story so extraordinary that it might as well have started with the twins Romulus and Remus suckling a she-wolf in a cave after they were cast out of the town of Alba Longa. For all of the interest in Italy before Rome, Rome’s remaking of Italy remains the defining story of the peninsula. The Etruscans and Greeks and everyone else serve as supporting characters to this main event. The Etruscans may have been “dancing in their colored wraps with massive yet exuberant naked limbs,” as Lawrence enthused, “ruddy from the air and the sea-light, dancing and fluting along through the little olive trees, out in the fresh day.” Meanwhile, the Romans just down the block were out to make history.

Spanish Lessons

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2023

Spanish lessons

On “1923–2023 Sorolla / Soto Centennials” & “Jewels in a Gem: Luz Camino at the Hispanic Society Museum” at the Hispanic Museum & Library.

The Hispanic Society of America was founded over a century ago to reflect a gilded vision of Spain and the Iberian peoples. Since 1904, this institution on Broadway and 155th Street has faced much harsher realities. The small independent entity—one of scholarly and artistic significance—has struggled so far removed from the limelight of New York’s Museum Mile. To this day the Hispanic Society remains the greatest New York collection few have ever heard of. Now, after a six-year closure to address its aging infrastructure, the museum and library have partially reopened with a renewed vision for the future. Just how much this vision aligns with the foresight of its remarkable founder, Archer Milton Huntington, is a picture still coming into view.

Archer Huntington was the stepson, and most likely illegitimate offspring, of Collis Huntington, one of the Big Four founders of the western railroad. Even more remarkable was his mother, Arabella, a significant collector of European art and a social outcast whose marriage to Huntington scandalized New York society. Arabella’s sense of independence encouraged her only child in his intense cultural pursuits. In 1882, while embarking on a Grand Tour at age twelve, Archer purchased a copy of The Zincali, George Borrow’s 1841 “Account of the Gypsies of Spain,” in a Liverpool bookshop. The book was one of several famous stories that informed the century’s Romantic affinities for primitive Spain—joining Victor Hugo’s Hernani of 1830, Théophile Gautier’s Voyage en Espagne and Richard Ford’s Handbook for Travellers in Spain, both of 1845, and Georges Bizet’s Carmen of 1875.

View of the entrance to the Hispanic Society Museum & Library. Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

As Huntington continued on to London and Paris, he was already envisioning an art collection along the lines of Sir Richard Wallace’s, paired with a library akin to the National Gallery’s, dedicated to the cultures of Spain and the Spanish diaspora. In 1891, to understand better the history of Al-Andalus, he even hired a tutor to teach him Arabic, at a time when no American institution offered classes in the language. On tours through Spain in 1892, 1896, and 1898, he purchased trunks of Spanish photographs while studying the country’s art and culture (the society now has 175,000 such images). In 1902 he acquired the bibliographic collection of Manuel Pérez de Guzmán y Boza, Marqués de Jerez de los Caballeros, who was his mentor. Soon Huntington had the most important collection of Spanish books and manuscripts outside of Spain, a collection growing to two hundred thousand manuscripts and more than three hundred thousand printed books, including over fifteen thousand volumes from before 1700. He paired this collection with paintings by Spanish masters—Velázquez, Goya, Zurbarán, El Greco—which he was determined to purchase only from the international market, so as not to deplete the country’s own cultural patrimony.

Installation view of “Jewels in a Gem: Luz Camino and Jewelry” with Sorolla’s Visions of Spain (1913–19) above. Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

In 1908 Huntington opened his collection to the public in a Beaux-Arts building on Audubon Terrace, so named for being at one time part of John James Audubon’s estate. The building was nearly contemporaneous with Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Venetian vision in Boston’s Back Bay and equally novel, though less flamboyant. As the capstone to the collection, in 1911 Huntington commissioned Joaquín Sorolla to paint a mural of multiple “panneaux” of various Spanish regions, which he installed in its own purpose-built octagon-shaped wing. This impressionistic cyclorama of traditional Spanish culture was called, appropriately, Vision of Spain (1913–19), reflecting Huntington’s own dreamy vision for his new institution.

After Huntington’s death in 1955, there were times when it seemed the lid to his jewel box was bolted shut. When it wasn’t being shouted down as “racista”—as happened to one of its directors in the 1990s while he was chased across Audubon Terrace—the Hispanic Society put little of its energies into its own forward-facing persona. Part of this was an extension of Huntington’s own self-effacing style. “To place one’s name on a donation be it a building or subscription is an artificial and flimsy door to fame,” he once said. “The human race is full of creators, but it is their acts . . . which are interesting.”

Instead, the society continued to focus on scholarship and filling out its permanent collection of books, art, artifacts, and sculpture, in particular from the Spanish New World and Spain’s onetime Pacific colonies. Today the collection has grown to include four-thousand-year-old ceramics from the Bell Beaker culture of the Tagus river estuary, Roman statuary from Seville, Islamic pottery and Alhambra silk, Hebrew manuscripts, a map by Giovanni Vespucci, and Renaissance and Baroque ironwork on up through the Symbolist paintings of Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa. Last year, as its main building remained shuttered, two temporary exhibitions revealed the great depth of this collection: “Gilded Figures: Wood and Clay Made Flesh,” an exhibition curated by Patrick Lenaghan with his Hispanic Society colleague Hélène Fontoira Marzin, on the history of Spanish polychrome sculpture; and a display at the Grolier Club of highlights from the society’s library, organized by the society’s former director Mitchell A. Codding and the curator John O’Neill. (See “Visions of Spain” in The New Criterion of January 2022.)

Joaquin Sorolla, Detail from Visions of Spain, 1913–19, Oil on canvas, Hispanic Society Museum, New York. Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

By some stroke of historical luck, the venerable but heavy hinges of the Hispanic Society were never forced open against the will of its founder. One could easily imagine the society’s takeover by a larger institution, the breaking of its indenture of trust along the lines of the Barnes Foundation, or, at the very least, a relocation downtown. Many such options were considered at various times in its existence, which in part may account for the deferred maintenance on its Audubon Terrace infrastructure.

Under the leadership of Philippe de Montebello, who was elected chairman of the society’s board in 2015, the institution has instead decided to double down on its Audubon campus. This has first meant upgrading the building’s aging envelope, designed by Charles Pratt Huntington, and bringing its systems, in particular its climate control, up to modern standards. The museum has also developed a strategic plan with Selldorf Architects to renovate the campus with the executive architects Beyer Blinder Belle and the landscape architects Reed Hilderbrand. An adjoining building to the east, originally the headquarters of the Museum of the American Indian, is being incorporated into the Hispanic Society campus, allowing for ada access to the Main Court galleries while introducing a new conservation studio, a wheelchair entrance, and spaces for special exhibitions and education. This longer phase of the project is still tens of millions of dollars and several years away.

View from Audubon Terrace. Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

Fortunately, even with the introduction of a new entrance in the east building, the society says the door of the Main Court will remain unlocked. Since the society is, and has always been, a free institution, Audubon Terrace is well suited to be an open campus with outdoor seating and concessions—and access to its other remaining cultural institution, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, just up the courtyard. “If you are a regular, and you have a ten-minute lunch break,” says Guillaume Kientz, the society’s new director, “and you want to see the Duchess of Alba, you can do that.” The terrace’s program of Spanish-themed statuary—depictions of Don Quixote and El Cid created by Huntington’s remarkable wife, Anna Hyatt Huntington—is also an integral part of the society’s cultural program and best observed from the Main Court landing.

This past summer, the Hispanic Society reopened its Main Court after its six-year restoration, the first phase of the renovation project. While the treasures of its collection are still on tour through the summer, the museum dedicated its main gallery to the centennials of two artists: Sorolla (1863–1923) and the Venezuelan sculptor Jesús Rafael Soto (1923–2005), born in the year of Sorolla’s death.1 Through the fall, visitors to the terrace will continue to encounter Soto’s Penetrable (1990), a large cube of steel, aluminum, and plastic hoses on long-term loan from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros—a work that trades Soto’s usual optical delicacy for crowd-pleasing interactivity. While Sorolla’s portraits of Spanish life and the genre scenes of his Vision of Spain have little to do with Soto’s kinetic abstractions, the assembly spoke to the breadth of the society’s mandate while also allowing us to open the lid, after a painfully long wait, of the institution.

Jesús Rafael Soto, Penetrable, 1990, Steel, aluminum & plastic hoses, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. Photo: Courtesy of the Hispanic Society Museum.

Yet those of us expecting a full return to form will have to sit tight. What are described as essential repairs to the roof have now covered over the skylights in the Main Court and Sorolla galleries. The darkened result, interspersed with retina-burning spotlights, is heartbreaking for those of us who recall these formerly dreamy spaces. This is especially true when trying to appreciate the Main Court’s intricate terracotta walls and its imagined sense of a sunlit medieval cloister. While the society maintains that plans are in place to install artificial laylight behind the skylight glass, the remediation could not come soon enough. A public-spirited philanthropist could do worse than to underwrite the improvement of gallery lighting. As the Old Masters were almost all painted under natural light, their happy viewing calls out for equivalent illumination.

Installation view of “1923–2023 Sorolla / Soto Centennials.” Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

The inclusion of modern and contemporary work also suggests something of a change in the priorities of the institution. While it is true that Huntington for a time embraced the contemporary Spanish art of his day—collecting Sorolla, Ramon Casas, Joaquin Mir Trinxet, Santiago Rusiñol, and Ignacio Zuloaga—he came to distance his Hispanic Society from the art of his own time. “Modern art is not our intention to show in exhibitions,” he declared. “That is a dealer’s affair and not, in my opinion, one for museums.”

Starting September 15, the treasures of the society’s collection are finally returning to its walls, but the installation will no longer be a fixed display of highlights as we experienced in the past. Certainly, with a collection of three-quarters of a million objects, there is a lot to show here. Some shuffling around would be welcome and refreshing. Yet as with most every other museum—including the venerable Frick Collection—today there seems to be an urge to put historic collections in “dialogue” with contemporary art. These interventions are often forced and merely there to serve some political or commercial end—a “dealer’s affair,” in Huntington’s choice words.

Installation view of “Jewels in a Gem: Luz Camino and Jewelry.” Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

The society’s summer display of contemporary jewelry by Luz Camino was one such letdown.2 Filled with loans from a Who’s Who of rich collectors, the exhibition was no doubt designed to stimulate the philanthropic glands of the society’s major donors. Even worse, the exhibition’s gaudy displays were all positioned directly in front of the panels of Sorolla’s Vision of Spain. The cases obscured their view and fully blocked their labels. Despite its wide embrace of Spain and Spanish culture, the Hispanic Society shouldn’t need to include Las Vegas in its purview.

Acentury ago, Archer Huntington set out not to record the Spanish world of the present but to preserve a vision of its past, one that was already fast disappearing. His interest may have been based on a Romantic fiction, but there was a time when we could embrace the power of fiction to triumph over everyday fact. “We can only be grateful to the boy who discovered Spain in a Liverpool bookshop,” says the Hispanic Society curator Patrick Lenaghan, “and, thus inspired, created this extraordinary museum and library.” Even today, we should be able to dream the impossible dream that is the Hispanic Society of America.

1.   “1923–2023 Sorolla / Soto Centennials” was on view at the Hispanic Society of America, New York, from May 25 through July 15, 2023.

2.   “Jewels in a Gem: Luz Camino at the Hispanic Society Museum” opened at the Hispanic Society of America, New York, on May 25 and remains on view through September 3, 2023.

The Inside-Out Diorama

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2023

The inside-out diorama

On the new Richard Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History.

Anyone who has walked through the American Museum of Natural History might have sensed something was wrong. Just go through its Hall of Gems and Minerals, or its Hall of South American Peoples, or its Hall of Pacific Peoples. At the end of each of these long rooms, which were only reached through other long rooms, you found nothing less than a dead end. In a way, the reason was by design: the master plan of this museum, founded in 1869 and first envisioned by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould in 1872, has never been fully realized. Much like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and other grand nineteenth-century American edifices, New York’s natural-history museum was laid out on a massive cross-in-square plan, which has only been partially built out over time.

Beyond merely the dead ends, what this means is that, over a century and a half after its founding, the street-facing façades and infill architecture of this museum have been created in a progression of styles that have reflected, for better and worse, the ideals of their times. The museum began on the southern side of its four-block quadrangle bordering Central Park, carved out of the street grid of the then-undeveloped Upper West Side. From 1874 to 1877, Vaux and Mould extended their pastoral vision from Central Park to break ground on the museum’s first wing in the Gothic Revival style; from then until now, this building, which was soon surrounded by future construction, has housed the museum’s Northwest Coast Hall.

An aerial view of the American Museum of Natural History’s campus. Photo: Iwan Baan.

The plan to extend this Gothic language across the four seven-hundred-and-forty-foot sides of the envisioned museum was quickly eclipsed by changing architectural taste. In 1897, a new plan emerged to complete the museum in a Romanesque Revival style. The Seventy-seventh Street façade, designed by Cady, Berg & See and constructed between 1890 and 1900, and the southwest wing, designed by Charles Volz and built between 1906 and 1908, gave the museum its fanciful red turrets and first distinctive appearance.

The need for natural light and air at one time called for four internal open courtyards located within the circulating wings, all radiating out from a domed central tower. In the twentieth century, with advances in artificial light and ventilation, these open spaces began to be modified and built in. Rather than a dome, the central building became the museum’s lecture hall, designed by Cady, Berg & See in 1900. Wings for ocean life and education filled in the southwest and southeast courtyards in 1924 and 1928. A power and service building of 1930–35 infilled the northwest courtyard. Meanwhile the art-deco Hayden Planetarium, designed by Trowbridge & Livingston, was constructed in the northeast courtyard in 1934–35. At the same time, between 1931 and 1936, the museum’s eastern façade fronting Central Park West received John Russell Pope’s Roman Revival grand vision for the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Rotunda, complete with a triumphal arch, coffered vaulted interiors, and an equestrian statue of our twenty-sixth president mounted at the center of a monumental entry plaza. Then, over half a century later, a year-2000 addition by Polshek Partnership, which replaced the Hayden with the Rose Center for Earth & Space, stayed within this original master plan while again departing in style, this time resulting in a celestial sphere (housing the new planetarium theater) suspended in an illuminated glass cube.

Despite over a century and a half, and the construction of some twenty-five buildings, the museum has still only filled out about two-thirds of its original master-plan footprint. This incompleteness has been most felt on its western side facing Columbus Avenue, where existing wings have ended abruptly, resulting in many of those back-tracking dead ends. A central building that connects these wings, on all four of the museum’s floors, has long been overdue.

The Columbus Avenue entrance to the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation. Photo: Alvaro Keding / © AMNH.

The Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, over a decade in the making and opened to the public on May 4, set out to do just that. (For more, see “Old museums, new tricks” in The New Criterion of February 2017.) Filling in a void along the museum’s western edge, the 230,000-square-foot wing creates some thirty new access points to the museum’s twenty-building complex. It also generally continues the massing of the original master plan while extending the museum’s central axis west from the Roosevelt Rotunda, resulting in a new façade that now lines up with Seventy-ninth Street.

Funded by one of New York’s great latter-day philanthropists, the Gilder Center is named for the late Republican financier who once teamed up with none other than George Soros to found the Central Park Conservancy. Among the other New York–based beneficiaries of Richard Gilder’s largesse before his death in 2020 were the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and the magazine you are now reading.

Early on the Gilder Center was designated to expand the museum’s educational mission, with additional classroom space as well as room to display more of the museum’s permanent collection of objects and scientific specimens, of which only 2–3 percent might ever be on view at any given time. Rising over three stories, these new displays, called the Louis V. Gerstner Jr. Collections Core and the Macaulay Family Foundation Collections Gallery, are among the Gilder Center’s most beneficial new additions. Behind the vitrines we can see the new rolling-stack storage shelves where some 12 percent of the museum’s collection, or four million specimens, has been, or is being, relocated. These displays, by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, reveal the breadth and depth of the museum’s holdings while also, for the first time, giving us a window onto its activities as a working scientific institution.

The development of open storage has been an undersung initiative of recent museum practice, one that in fact revives the object-based focus of the Renaissance Wunderkammer, the precursor of our nineteenth-century museums. At the Gilder Center, touch screens and detailed labels tell us much about these slices of the museum’s varied collection. In one area are displays of antique lantern slides, eastern box turtles, giant extinct mammals, wasp nests and galls, cleared and stained fish, New York rocks, Gaia astronomical data, Korean pottery, Maasai beadwork, and even a selection of Vladimir Nabokov’s butterflies. Another floor contains handmade African toys, bats, insects and spiders, parrots, astronomical instruments, amphibians, field documentation, a hadrosaur footprint, crinoid fossils, and the bones of a giant grouper. Still another houses Pueblo pottery, Maya bricks, Camarasaurus vertebrae, animal horns, drill core samples, trilobite fossils, sea-snail shells, megalodon teeth, ammonite fossils, and a captivating display of corals and echinoderms. Nearby, yet another new storage room and study center, visible through a window, now contains a sizeable percentage of the museum’s 3.1 million specimens of moths and butterflies. The one discordant note in all this is “Housewares of the Mao Era,” a display of Communist agitprop that describes the Cultural Revolution as merely a “sweeping campaign to reshape and reeducate Chinese society.” By sweeping away the death of some thirty million Chinese, the museum might satisfy ccp censors, but the appalling omission should not escape our notice.

The David S. and Ruth L. Gottesman Research Library and Learning Center at the Richard Gilder Center. Photo: Alvaro Keding / © AMNH.

A new library and reading room on the top floor, called the David S. and Ruth L. Gottesman Research Library and Learning Center, continues the spirit of open storage with walls of books and artifacts. The library is another achievement of the Gilder wing, bringing the museum’s extensive bibliographic collection out from a hidden location off of the dinosaur hall into wider and more welcoming public view. A wall of floor-to-ceiling shelves called the “Great Range” contains models of a polar bear from 1912, of a Camarasaurus from circa 1919, and of HMS Beagle from circa 2005. Also here is a crate from the museum’s Congo expedition (ca. 1909–15), a museum flag from its land exhibition of 1941, and a lunar tire prototype from 2011. Nearby, for the first time, the library has an alcove to exhibit a selection of its rare books, objects, and manuscripts, such as a 1705 edition of Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium.

One of the wing’s new permanent exhibits is the five-thousand-square-foot Susan and Peter J. Solomon Family Insectarium. The ground-floor display makes the best case for our buggy acquaintances, whether they be vectors for our diseases—by a wide margin, the mosquito has been the most lethal animal to human life—or the essential pollinators of our food supply. Here the focus is an elaborate terrarium of live leaf-cutter ants walking across ropes and bridges with their snipped loads. A floor up, the Davis Family Butterfly Vivarium relocates the museum’s live butterfly room from its digs in the Whitney Memorial Hall, with historical dioramas Pacific bird life that will now hopefully be restored and reopened, to a more permanent home.

Life’s interconnectedness is a recurring theme of the Gilder Center. A twelve-minute immersive video called “Invisible Worlds,” designed by Tamschick Media+Space with Boris Micka Associates, is a remarkable feat of interactive projection. Still, I am not sure how much insight can genuinely be gleaned from its ambient soundtrack and ASMR narration—“humans have created digital networks to extend the reach of our ideas. How many texts have you sent today?” asks a breathy female narrator. More thought-provoking are the touch-screen quizzes in the film’s entry hall, asking whether we are more closely related to mold or moss (the answer is mold, by a difference of some five hundred million years) or sea sponges or starfish (starfish, by two hundred million years).

The Invisible Worlds Immersive Experience at the Richard Gilder Center. Photo: Iwan Baan.

The Gilder Center has tucked its many exhibits and displays around a five-story entry atrium designed by Jeanne Gang that is presented as the showpiece of the project. On the building’s exterior, blocks of Milford pink granite—the very same stone used on Pope’s Roosevelt Rotunda—have been cut by computer into sedimentary wave-like patterns. On the interior, shotcrete, a spray-on concrete used primarily for tunnel construction, has been slathered and scraped onto rebar molds to form the walls and ceilings. The architect has described the forms of this space as being inspired by slot caverns, riverbank canyons, melting blocks of ice, and prehistoric cave dwellings. Its construction is presented as ecologically sensitive in every conceivable way; talk of climate change is never far from the sales pitch. The result is a cross between Antoni Gaudí and Fred Flintstone. This is not to suggest the forms are not arresting. The atrium leads onto a grand staircase by way of Castle Grayskull. Pseudo land-bridges connect the upper floors. The shotcrete surfaces, left scraped and raw, have the look of tufted wool from afar and the feel of coarse-grit sandpaper up close. The walls can catch the raking sunlight in a satisfying sculptural way. In contrast, any knee or hand that catches its sharp and crumbly surface will feel most unsatisfied. I can only imagine how this rough aggregate will age once the first cup of coffee spills down its side and gum sticks to its surface. I fear starchitects, especially those bearing eco-pablum.

The staircase in the Kenneth C. Griffin Exploration Atrium of the Richard Gilder Center. Photo: Iwan Baan.

For all of its nature-like forms, this shotcrete architecture is also the most artificial aspect of the new facility. The American Museum of Natural History is known for its historical dioramas. One way to see this design is as a diorama turned inside out, one where we are the specimens on view. It is interesting to note that shotcrete was invented by no less than the naturalist Carl Akeley, the pioneer of the museum’s historical dioramas.

But now the diorama frame is gone. So too is all of the historicized architecture, washed away in the same progressive deluge that recently toppled the Roosevelt statue from the museum’s front stairs. What results is a museum wiped down to the bone. Here is a post-apocalyptic vision where we are no longer the civilized masters of the universe but cave dwellers once again. In our self-obsessed age, perhaps it is appropriate finally to be the subject of this museum’s latest and largest diorama. Just what the five-story display says about the future of humanity is a label yet to be written. If I had my way, to borrow a line popularized by William F. Buckley Jr., I might simply suggest, Don’t immanentize the eschaton. The anthropocene will never kill us, but scientism just might.