Ron Hartwig, the J. Paul Getty Trust’s vice president for communications, responds to my comments about the Getty’s label for its so-called “Aphrodite,” which I discussed in the last part of Iowa’s Pollock at the Figge: The Masterpiece and the Myth:
To answer your question about why gallery labels sometimes disagree with scholarship, and with regard to our particular case, I’d like to provide some background as to why the label for the Cult Statue of a Goddess (which is actually labeled “perhaps Aphrodite,” not “probably Aphrodite” [or maybe not—see below]) continues to remain on display.
According to Karol Wight, the Getty Museum’s senior curator of antiquities, while a “lively ” debate between Clemente Marconi and Malcolm Bell, both recognized scholars in the area of Sicilian archaeology and art, did take place at the workshop held in May 2007 at the Getty Villa over the identity of the statue (should she be identified as Hera, Demeter, Persephone, or Aphrodite?), the outcome of the discussion was sufficiently in question so as not to change the label.
During the debate it was clear that Mac Bell favored Hera, while Clemente Marconi favored Demeter or Persephone. Both of these opinions are published in the papers they presented at the workshop. Your readers can find these papers published on our website. But the third opinion in the room was the curatorial one, which continued to stand behind an identity of Aphrodite in the absence of a fully persuasive argument for a new identity.
Based on the outcome of the debate, Karol made the decision to leave the Cult Statue’s label as it is for now because neither Mac Bell’s nor Clemente Marconi’s argument was fully developed at the time. Clemente Marconi will shortly be publishing a lengthier article on the statue for “Antike Plastik,” and until we see what further arguments Professor Marconi makes, we don’t plan to change the label. This is a case of ongoing scholarship.
So until the ongoing scholarship is complete, the label will remain as is.
As it was—on Feb. 6, 2008, when I visited and took photos at the Getty Villa (nine months after the experts’ report), here’s what the label said:
