The Museum's Memory: Three Sculptures and Their Peculiar Stories

Each museum has its own story. The museum's technical team researches and constructs narratives through the collections held by these memory institutions. By researching, preserving, and communicating, they give meaning to the objects that make up their collections...

Museum professionals transform a collection of items into a repository of knowledge. This essential purpose of museums is explicit in the mission of the National Museum of Fine Arts.

The photographs we found in our archives allow us to reflect on the choices of works used to compose the exhibition spaces of the MNBA. The purposes of each exhibition make up the history of museums.

Carved from a single block of marble from Saravezza, Italy, it represents part of the biblical passage JOHN 8:1-11, in which Jesus protects a woman who, having been proven to have betrayed her husband, would have been condemned by the law of the time to be stoned in a public square.

This work, of unidentified authorship, is an original piece in Parian marble, from Greece. It was found in the 19th century during excavations sponsored by Empress Teresa Cristina of Brazil, in the vicinity of Rome, more precisely in Veii, an ancient Etruscan city.

Antinous was the lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian (who lived between 117 AD and 138 AD). Sculptures in his honor are plentiful, with features of Dionysus or Bacchus, Greek and Roman deities, respectively, linked to wine.

Antinous' head is adorned with a wreath of vine leaves. Besides wine, the vine is associated with knowledge of the mysteries of rebirth and the afterlife in Greek culture.