Jack and Mary Ann Frable Curator of Ancient Art at VMFA
Dr. Peter Justin Moon Schertz has served as curator of Ancient Art since October 2006 and the Jack and Mary Ann Frable Curator of Ancient Art since 2007. Dr. Schertz received his BA in classical languages and literature from the University of Chicago (1987) and his PhD in Classical Art and Archaeology from the University of Southern California (2004). In addition to his museum work, Dr. Schertz worked as an editor for the Israel Antiquities Authority and currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Association of Art Museum Curators.
At VMFA, Dr. Schertz curated the exhibition The Horse in Ancient Greek Art (2017) and has engaged in a number of research projects, including as the co-director of the Arch of Titus Digital Restoration Project and as co-director of the NEH-supported study of the Richmond Caligula, now published as New Studies on the Portrait of Caligula in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Brill, 2020). He has also published on the Second Temple in Jerusalem in its Roman context and is currently researching the history and significance of equestrian statues from the Marcus Aurelius statue in Rome to Kehinde Wiley's Rumors of War at the VMFA. He is particularly interested in how new technologies can help us understand and interpret ancient art.
The National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. is one of the most recent and popular destinations on the National Mall. Designed by the modernist architect Friedrich St. Florian, this monument’s overall design and its details are deeply rooted in the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. In this lecture, Peter Schertz provides an…
The Temple of Herod in Jerusalem was one of the largest and most thoroughly documented religious sanctuaries in the Roman world. Described as an “Ornament to Empire” by its destroyer, the future emperor Titus, it is the Temple that stood in the time of Jesus. Working with archaeological evidence as well as ancient Jewish, Christian,…
We encounter ancient sculptures thousands of years after they were created and can readily imagine the complete form of these statues, despite missing parts and broken bits. But it is much harder to imagine something we hardly ever glimpse — color! Ancient statues were painted, often with bright, gaudy pigments. This lecture explores the color of ancient statues and how modern researchers are discovering surviving traces of those colors in order to recreate sculpture’s original appearance.
Many of us first encounter the art of the ancient Greeks through their vases. Though familiar to us, these apparently simple, functional objects often mystify and even baffle both the young and the old. In this lecture, Peter Schertz demystifies Greek vases by exploring how they were made and used, who made them and the significance of both their shapes and their decoration.