Exhibitions

'Imaginary Creatures' in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance as represented in Pagan, Jewish, Islamic, and Christian Book Art.
This exhibition to usher in 'the spooky season' at the Klau Library of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati is co-organized by the UC classics library.
Featured are such creatures as the Chimaera, a popular motif seen in ancient coins, here on a hemidrachm from Sikyon from circa 330-280 BCE, and in a famous Etruscan bronze sculpture, the 'Chimaera of Arezzo" from ca. 400 BCE, now in Florence, Italy.  The griffon was another popular creature featured in all media in antiquity, here on a bronze coin from Sicily from circa 360-340 BCE, and on a fresco from the so called Throne Room in the "Palace" of Knossos from ca. 1700-1450 BCE.  

Ovid's Metamorphoses is replete with imaginary creatures. This edition from the early 18th century has a woodcut depicting a young woman, Daphne, in the process of being transformed into a (laurel) tree to excape the advances of a god, Apollo. For Ovid the borders between animals, human and other, and even plants and rivers, all of nature, were fluid. Ovid and Hesiod in the Theogony and Homer in the Odyssey describe many imaginary creatures such as Medusa, the Lernaean Hydra, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Maenads and Satyrs, Nymphs and Fauns, Centaurs, the Cyclops, Argus, Cherberus, and others included in the exhibition. 

The Exultet Scroll (second shelf from the top on the left) is a Christian liturgical text from the Middle Ages (ca. 980) read on Easter Saturday. This facsimile is of an original scroll from Benevento, east of Naples. It features both pagan and Christian imaginary creature iconography. On the top shelf to the left is a Flemish manuscript fragment from the 15th century depicting a personification of Death killing a Virgin. On the top shelf to the right is a facsimile of the Sacramentary of Metz (ca. 870) featuring angels, a favorite imaginary creature motif in Christian art.   

The mandrake plant took on human form already in antiquity. It was said that the  scream of the plant if uprooted could kill. The mandrake was a popular theme in pagan, Islamic, Jewish, Christian art and literature from antiquity and the middle ages to the 19th century. Mandrake amulets were particulary popular in German-speaking countries where they provided good fortune if they were clothed, fed, and bedded properly. This mandrake (upper left) is from Materia Medica (based on the writings of Dioscurides and others).  The plant "human" was also used for a variety of medicinal purposes, and by alchemists in attempts to create homunculus (little human).  

This precious Jewish prayer book (MS 311 Mahzor) from 14th century Italy includes the text for the Mishnaic tractate Pirke Avot and depicts a colorful dragon wearing a fool's hat at the beginning of the second chapter. In addition to Avot, the manuscript contains the Grace after meals, prayers for the Sabbath, Rosh hodesh, Hanukkah, Purim, and Pesah, and liturgy for the High holidays and Sukkot.

'MS 279 Mahzor' (Spain and Italy, 15th c.). A Jewish prayer book brought to Italy by refugees of the Spanish Inquisition features marginalia with delightful dragons, griffons, grotesques, and a winged goat. The text was written in Spain and the marginal notes and images were added in Italy. 

'Scroll 65.1 Ilan' (Italy, 15th c.). The scroll on the bottom shelf to the right contains a detailed diagram of the Kabbalistic Sefirot which was used by students of Jewish mysticism to meditate on God's manifestation in the physical world. A dragon protects the medallion of Malkhut. The scroll on the top shelf to the left is 'Scroll 56 Esther' (Central Europe, mid-18th c.). The figures are detailed with careful shading in the cross-hatch style, the work of the Morovian school, modeled after engravers of Dutch printing presses. Several fantasy creatures appear such as griffons and, as here, unicorns in the central column.

Greek Refugees from Asia Minor.
This exhibition and event on March 24, 2024 (parts of this exhibition will temporarily be taken down on April 24 to make room for an exhibition on Stobaeus in connection with a conference) commemorated the so-called Population Exchange following the Greco-Turkish War stipulating the current borders of Turkey and Greece and the transfer of ca. 1.2 million Christian Orthodox Turks to Greece and ca. 400,000 Muslim Greeks to Turkey. Some 100 Greek Americans with ties to Asia Minor attended the event and shared stories of their families and contributed mementos to the exhibition.  

The exhibition was featured on TV, Channel 9.

Greek Refugees from Asia Minor.
The program leaflet features some of the exhibited items such as the dolls and the Near East Relief posters launching a 30 million dollar campaign to aid refugees.
The exhibition was subsequently lent to the Greek Orthodox Church in Cincinnati and their Panegyri Festival.

Greek Refugees from Asia MInor.
Dolls in Greek and Balkan folk costumes and embroideries made by refugees, and photographs of Greeks in Asia Minor from around 1918, just before the Greco-Turkish War.

Greek Refugees from Asia Minor.
Embroideries and photographs of Lauren Peters' grandmother who came from the island of Koutalis (now Ekinlik Island). The grandmother was an extraordinary seamstress who had worked for a pasha and his harem in Constantinople. 

Greek Refugees from Asia Minor.
Exhibited are dolls and purses made by orphans and refugees in workshops run by Priscilla Capps (featured in a folk costume in the exhibition flyer above), daughter of Princeton classics professor Edward Capps and director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Priscilla was director of Near East Industries in Athens, which manufactured the dolls and purses, imported to the U.S. by Kimport Dolls Inc. in Independence, Missouri. On loan from Professor Jack Davis.

Greek Refugees from Asia Minor.
Folk costume from Amalia, Attica. From the collection of the Greek Orthodox Church in Cincinnati.

Greek Refugees from Asia Minor.
Several photographs of refugees show happier times.

Stobaeus.
Susan Prince, Associate Professor of Classics at UC, with Christopher Moore (Penn State), and the UC Classics Department recently (May 2-4, 2024) organized a conference on the Greek anthologist/compiler Stobaeus with more than 30 world-renowned experts such as David Runia (Melbourne), Michele Curnis (Madrid), and Gretchen Reydams-Schils (Notre Dame, M.A., UC) giving papers. Stobaeus is important as he collected excerpts or selections (Eclogae) and "lectures" or readings (Sermones) from many ancient Greek writers such as poets, especially Euripides, philosophers, especially Plato, but also philosophers for whom no work has been preserved such as Pythagoras and the Stoic Musonius Rufus, orators, physicians, and historians. Stobaeus often arranged the didactic and pedagogic selections topically, for example, 'virtue,' 'self-control,' and 'discipline,' and more concrete ones such as 'farming,' 'kingship,' and 'marriage.' One of the Stobaeus experts at the conference (Stephen White, Texas at Austin) made a comparison to students highlighting passages. Stobaeus 'highlighted passages' he deemed particularly valuable for his son to read. From the choice of excerpts and arrangements, scholars attempt to discern the man and his worldview. We know next to nothing about Stobaeus, not even his actual name since 'Stobaeus' means the man from Stobi (in Macedonia). We also do not know his chronology; however, since he does not have excerpts from anyone post-5th century, it can be surmised that he did not live beyond that century. 

In connection with the conference, the library curated an exhibition featuring one of its many important rare books, the editio princeps of Stobaeus’ Eclogues books 3 and 4 edited by Italian physician and scholar Victoris Trincavellii or Vittore Trincavelli ("editio Trincavelliana"), Έκλογαί ảποφθεγμάτων (“selections (or excerpts) of sayings”), from Venice (February!) 1536. The printed book reproduces border illuminations found in the original manuscripts (such as Plut. 58.11, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence). 

The library also owns two early and important Gesnerus editions (Swiss physician and philologist Conrad Gessner): the 2nd edition from Basel 1549 (Kέρας  (τῆς) Άμαλθείας, “Cornucopia”),

and the 3rd edition from Zürich 1559.
Professor Michele Curnis noted that our Gessner 2nd edition has marginal annotations which he suspects are centuries old and deserve study in their own right. 

The library also owns the 1797 edition by Nicolaus or Nils Schow of Sermones (aka Florilegium or Anthology),

and the Thomas Gaisford Oxford 1822 edition in 4 volumes.

Also featured were a series of dissertations and celebratory lectures from the library’s collection of “German Dissertations and Programschriften”: Commentatio de Stobaei eclogis by Curt Wachsmuth, Göttingen 1871; Lectiones Stobenses quibus ad audiendam de tragicis minoribus orationem by Otto Hence, Halle 1872; and Peripateticorum philosophia moralis secundum Stobaeum by Hermann Meurer, Weimar 1859;

and about Musonius Rufus (in Stobaeus), Musonius bei Stobaeus by Theodor Pflieger, Freiburg 1897; and Quaestiones Stobenses by Otto Bernhardt, Bonn 1861.

Bicentennial of the First Jewish Congregation in Cincinnati .
On January 18, 2024, an exhibition marked the bicentennial of the first Jewish congregation in Cincinnati, the first west of New York. In cooperation with the Klau Library, Hebrew Union College.

Bicentennial of the First Jewish Congregation in Cincinnati.
Included was a Torah, an old photo of the Plum Street Temple, then named the Isaac M. Wise Temple, an early copy of the (American) Israelite, and a program leaflet from the centennial celebration 100 years earlier, and rare books and incunabula of works by Josephus and Philo, and much more.   

The Return of the Lupa to Eden Park.
On November 3, 2024, the She-Wolf was returned to Eden Park from which it had been stolen and vandalized the year before. The so called Lupa with the twins Romulus and Remus was a gift from the city of Rome to the city of Cincinnati in 1931. It was placed in Eden Park in 1932 where it stood peacefully and to the delight of many generations of Cincinnatians until criminals decided to rob the children of Cincinnati of that joy. The Italian American community with the City of Cincinnati joined forces to replace the statue. A gypsum model of the so called Capitoline She-Wolf (the model for the original Eden Park Lupa) in a plaster museum at the University of Florence, Italy, was used to recreate the statue.

The Return of the Lupa to Eden Park.
This sign was part of the exhibition pointing to a relief of the She-Wolf and Twins on the parapet of the Blegen Library building.

The Return of the Lupa to Eden Park.
The exhibition included several passages in rare books of the works of Livy, Plutarch, Ovid, Propertius, Virgil, Cicero, and others narrating the story of the Wolf and Twins. 

The Return of the Lupa to Eden Park.
The exhibition featured the library's card-board cutout of the Wolf and humus spreads. 

Seneca, Nero, Shostakovich, Stalin & Stoicism: 'An Evening with Seneca.'.
In October 2024, with an exhibition and event the classics library and department celebrated the Roman author and statesman Seneca the Younger with a panel discussion, a music performance, and interdisciplinary undergraduate Stoic Week participation. This was the third event in the library series, 'Celebrating Greek and Roman Authors.'

Seneca, etc..
The exhibition featured a 1599 Paris Gruterus edition, a 1610 Antwerp Lipsius second edition, a 1675 Lipsius fourth edition with engravings by Rubens of a portrait bust of Seneca and of him dying in the bath.

Seneca, etc.
It also featured a 1658 4-volume Elzevir Gronovius edition, all early critical editions of Seneca’s philosophical writings, and an incunable from 1497 of works of Tacitus, a chief source of Seneca’s biography, and an original Roman copper coin of emperor Nero, and much more.

Seneca, etc.
Lipsius fourth edition of Seneca's philosophical works.

Seneca, etc.
Seneca's tragedies, here Medea.

Jews in Greece.
Jewish people had found refuge in Greece from Spain and other places of persecution. Thessaloniki in particular had a large population of some 150,000 Jews before WWII when most were killed at Auschwitz. This exhibition highlighted better times in Thessaloniki and Athens with books and artifacts on loan from UC Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies, Steven Bowman. 

An Evening with Aristophanes.
This was the second exhibition and event in the library series, 'Celebrating Greek and Roman Authors.' The exhibition in April 2019, featured rare books and facsimiles of the works of Aristophanes, and the event a presentation of the works of Aristophanes, a theater recital of Lysistrata performed by graduate students from Classics and CCM, and a music performance of 'Dionysian' Greek music by CCM graduate students.

On display were, for example, a 1540 Florence edition of a work comprising Aristophanes' Plutus,  Ranae, Acharnes, Aues, Concionantes, Nebulae, Equites, Vespae, and Pax and a 1548 Venice edition of the comedies of Aristophanes.

Ancient Medicine.
This exhibition of rare books was to commemorate and highlight ancient predecessors to Andreas Vesalius such as Hippocrates, Galen, Dioscurides, Rufus of Ephesus, and many others.  It was curated as a pendant to an exhibition about Vesalius in the Health Sciences Library.

Ancient Medicine.
Besides rare books and manuscript facsimiles of medical texts, the exhibition featured an original Greek coin (Roman provincial) depicting the Greek “God of Medicine,” Asclepius, and a Roman coin depicting Salus, a personification of “Health.”  Also featured were so-called tamata, silver plaques depicting various ailing body parts common in Greek-Orthodox and some Roman-Catholic churches in contemporary Greece and Italy (on loan from Prof. van Minnen), but they have a long tradition going back to antiquity where they were also offered, but made of clay, in the temples of Asclepius, the precincts of which functioned as health centers and spas with the healing presence of dogs and snakes, and in the temples of other gods and goddesses with healing abilities.

Commemorating the Bicentennial of Greek Independence.
The Greek War of Independence, also known as the Greek Revolution, was waged against the Ottoman Empire between 1821 and 1829. The Revolution was celebrated by Greeks around the world on March 25 as Greek Independence Day. On that day in 2021, the library commemorated the 200th anniversary of the official beginning of the Revolution leading to a new independent Greece after almost 400 years of Turkish rule. As the exhibition opened during the worst plague since the Spanish Flu, COVID-19, while a physical exhibition in the library was organized, much-scanned material was shared online with colleagues around the world who were not able to attend in person. 

An Evening with Ovid.
March 28, 2018. Starting off the classics library series, Celebrating Greek and Latin Authors, was Ovid in conjunction with the 2000th anniversary of his death. It was commemorated with an exhibition of rare books and artifacts, poetry readings from the Metamorphoses, and a music recital of Benjamin Britten's 'Six Metamorphoses After Ovid.' 

An Evening with Ovid.
The library owns many rare editions of the Ovid's Metamorphoses.

An Evening with Ovid.
Featured were rare editions of the works of Ovid with Emperor Augustus, the source of much of Ovid’s chagrin, on top of the display, from a UC excavation at Troy.

Astrology.
This exhibit featured books on astrology, the 'astronomy' of antiquity, and the Middle Ages. The alignment of stars and planets was fundamental to the people of antiquity from ancient Mesopotamia to the European Middle Ages. The solar eclipses of 2017 and 2024 would have been interpreted as portents of either a coming disaster or fortune but would have fascinated ancient humans and scientists not unlike today. As more people lived in the countryside, they would have been even more keenly aware of the affects on animal behavior and temperature.  Solar eclipses have been recorded for more than 3000 years. 

Animals in Antiquity.
Once upon a time nonhuman animals were honored, even as gods and goddesses in ancient Egypt, divine substitutes and familiars to Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, and beloved companions. There were also animal rights advocates and vegans and vegetarians in ancient Greece and Rome. In March 2019, the library celebrated the animals of antiquity with a poster exhibition in Langsam and a virtual exhibition. The image depicts Apollo, the 'Adonis' among gods, as 'Apollo Smintheus,' 'Apollo, the Mouse God,' a powerful soothsayer.

Illuminated Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments 1400-1550. 
This exhibition featured some of the library's illuminated manuscripts and manuscript fragments, as well as a few facsimiles of illuminated manuscripts. 

Illuminated Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments 1400-1550. 
This fragment is from Northern Germany, probably Hildesheim, and dated to 1524-1525. It is from a Psalter/prayer book with 21-23 lines of Latin text. The script is gothic cursive on vellum. Three illuminated initials in gold or silver on red, violet, or brown ground with gold or silver tracery. Panel borders with gold ground, with floral motifs and with a fox trying to reach a rooster that is perched on top of a flower, and (verso) a dog leaping across the bottom of the page. The illuminated "D" begins the prayer "Deus qui Beate Marie..." On the verso is an illuminated "G" which begins the prayer: "Gloriosa dicta..." 

Illuminated Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments 1400-1550.
'Personified Death kills a Virgin.'  Book of Hours leaf on vellum, an early Dance of Death motif. Made in a French or Flemish scriptorium around 1490. 

Illuminated Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments 1400-1550.
The library owns ca. 30 illuminated manuscript leaves.

Children's Books.

This exhibit featured several of the most beloved children's books in the English-speaking world such as The Cat in the Hat (Cattus Petasatus), Alice in Wonderland (Alicia in Terra Mirabili), Charlotte's Web (Tela Charlottae), and Harry Potter (Ἅρειος Ποτήρ) which have been translated into Greek and Latin.  

From Greece to Magna Graecia.
This exhibition narrated in pottery the colonization by Greeks of parts of Southern Italy and Sicily beginning with the Euboeans founding the colony of Pithekoussai on the island of Ischia in the 8th century BCE and the Corinthians Syracuse on Sicily in 733 BCE.
The exhibition featured Corinthian miniature vessels, Attic black and red-figure vases as trading commodities, and Campanian red-figure. There was also an accompanying book exhibition highlighting literary sources on Magna Graecia as well as Greek temples, theaters, tomb paintings, etc., from Southern Italy and Sicily from the 8th to the 3rd centuries BCE. The pottery was on loan from the classics department.