If you were an art collector in the late 1920s, the last guy you wanted to see at an auction was John Ringling. The circus magnate.
Ringling was building a museum in Sarasota, FL, the winter headquarters for him and his circus, and needed art to fill it. Lots of art of the highest caliber.
Possessing nearly unlimited wealth, Ringling would routinely attend top auctions and clean them out. Paintings, sculptures, decorative arts. Antiquities. As was the case in 1928 with his attendance at the legendary auctions of the Cesnola Collection.
At these sales hosted by The Anderson Galleries in New York, Ringling purchased 3,300 works of ancient Mediterranean art. The majority of the pieces came from Cyprus where they were unearthed from temples and tombs by Luigi Palma di Cesnola during his tenure there as U.S. consul from 1865 to 1876. Cesnola subsequently became the first director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where selections from his full collection–some 30,000 items–were purchased between 1874 and 1876 and displayed before chunks of it deaccessioned. What Ringling purchased for display at his new museum had previously been part of the collections at The Met.
Although The Met’s Trustees promoted the auctions as sales of objects that were “duplicates” or “similar in character” to those on display at their museum, Ringling’s purchases included rare and unique pieces, particularly female sculptures, that remain unmatched in The Met’s holdings. As a result of Ringling’s acquisition of a large part of the Cesnola collection, The Ringling Museum’s holdings of ancient Cypriot art is the third largest in North America, following The Met and the Penn Museum.
As an interesting side note, previous direct sales of Cesnola Collection items to institutions around America seeded the antiquities departments at numerous esteemed art museums including those at Princeton and Stanford universities as well as the Newark Museum of Art. And, of course, what became Sarasota’s John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art.
Purchased with the intention of establishing a foundation in antiquity for his newly founded art museum in Sarasota, the Cesnola Collection items helped secure the Museum’s status as a world-class encyclopedic collection and destination.
1928 auction.
1929.
The stock market crash and onset of the Great Depression derailed Ringling’s plans to construct a dedicated building to house his collection of ancient art. He’d die not long after, in 1936. Ringling’s museum carried forward, but the combination of events prevented his complete vision for the institution with its ancient Cypriot art as a foundation from coming to fruition.
Until now.
“(Ringling) intended to create an encyclopedic collection and any encyclopedic art museum–of Western art–wants to have an ancient underpinning because it’s the foundation for so much art that comes after, and indeed, the foundation for the art that he focused on, namely Renaissance and Baroque,” Sarah Cartwright, Chief Curator and Ulla R. Searing Curator of Collections at The Ringling, told Forbes.com. “Without reference to antiquity–classical antiquity–one is missing a big piece of the of the story.”
Following more than a decade of research and conservation, the Ringling Museum of Art will now display more than 200 works from its collection of ancient art for the first time, fully interpreted and contextualized in a permanent collection gallery, realizing Ringling’s aspiration.
Ancient Art From Cyprus
The Ringling’s new permanent gallery installation, “Ancient Art from Cyprus and the Mediterranean,” includes sculptures in limestone and terracotta, ceramic and glass vessels, and gold and silver jewelry.
The centerpiece is a crowd of 50 statues from the Sanctuary at Golgoi, a sanctuary site in Cyprus dedicated to the god Apollo. These sculptures are part of at least 700 male limestone votive statues, figures dedicated as stand-ins for worshippers of the god, found at the sanctuary. The sculptures range in date from the late Archaic (late 7th century BCE) to the early Roman Period (1st century CE). At The Ringling, this crowd of sculptures has been assembled to approximate the visual experience of the sanctuary in antiquity, based on Cesnola’s descriptions of his discovery, but the exact find locations of each object at Golgoi are unknown.
“At first it may seem strange to people; when they come from the other entrance they’re at the standing at the top of the stairs, and they’re sort of eye level with these colossal male sculptures who would have been 10 feet high,” guest curator, archaeologist, and art historian Joanna S. Smith told Forbes.com. “Then, as they go down, they join the more human scale or even miniature scale sculptures. This is actually how artworks were presented in sanctuary spaces. People would dedicate one sculpture after another and so your experience of these works would have been in a community, not individual artwork standing on a single pedestal.”
This installation speaks to The Ringling’s goal in presenting the items. A goal extending beyond mere display and interpretation; an effort directed at giving visitors an opportunity to consider objects in relationship to their ancient viewing contexts.
“The experience that one will have is different from what you will find in other museums because of the emphasis on trying to give people a strong sense of the way in which the artworks might have been experienced in antiquity based on what we know about the kinds of places that these objects were made for,” Smith added.
In another section, she recreated how ancient Cypriots would have experienced funerary art.
“In Cyprus and in other places, they tended to have chamber tombs, which would have a long passage leading to an underground chamber,” Smith explained. “When you’re going down this section of the gallery, first you experience large grave stelae (gravestones) like you might be familiar with from ancient Greece, and in Cyprus, some of them might have been above ground, but the evidence actually suggests that they were meant to be placed in these passageways that eventually would have been filled with earth and then re-excavated when you put another family member in the tomb.”
Continuing on to display objects meant to be placed in the tomb chamber, Smith focused on how the ancients tried to make these spaces smell better with items like perfume containers and incense burners.
“At the very end is a selection of objects that were found in a particular tomb. This is the latest acquisition by the museum of a large number of Cypriot artworks,” Smith said. “In 1973, the museum received one tomb group from Cyprus that is actually the earliest material. It’s early Bronze Age (roughly 3,000 to 1,000 BCE in the eastern Mediterranean), and we know exactly where each piece was found, and we use that as the endpoint.”
Cyprus: Cultural Crossroads
Strategically located in the far eastern Mediterranean beneath modern day Turkey and near the Syrian coast, Cyprus became a cultural crossroads shaped by continuous trade and conquest over thousands of years. Empires sought to control its natural resources, especially its rich deposits of copper, which is one of the two ingredients needed to create bronze. The art of ancient Cyprus is a vital example of rich cultural exchange and innovation.
For this reason, the Ringling’s antiquities from Cyprus will recall objects from Greece and Rome guests will have seen at other museums, with important distinctions.
Cypriots imported objects, made artworks with imported materials, and adapted styles from elsewhere for their own creations. Their bronzes, textiles, sculptures, and vessels were known for quality throughout the Mediterranean region.
“One thing that really strikes me is the sculptures have a wide array of dress types, from Assyrian to Egyptian to Cypriot to Greek,” Smith said. “They’re very expressive. They combine many aspects of dress from different places into one.”
Notice the details.
“There’s a wonderful sculpture of Artemis where her head is very childlike. It’s very large in comparison to her body. You get a sense of her as a protector of children,” Smith said. “She’s got her arrows, and she’s Artemis, she’s the hunter, but she has this childlike head. She’s a wonderful example of a Cypriot version of the deity that is much more familiar in Greek art as the Huntress.”
Of the objects Ringling acquired from The Met, the female sculptures stand out. While The Met does still have ancient sculptures of female bodies, it tended to keep the heads and let go of the rest. The Ringling’s female bodies are exceptional, three particularly so. One of them is a colossal deity–perhaps Aphrodite or Artemis–nearly two-times life size.
The other two are human scaled. One of them is a priestess.
“She doesn’t have her head, but her clothing is spectacular. She is carved in such a way you really get a sense of the woolen cloak and the linen tunic that she wears underneath, and her jewelry, she has layer upon layer of necklaces,” Smith explained. “She is clearly a priestess because she has a pendant that at the bottom are clearly a series of seal rings, objects that were meant to be used to make impressions in clay, sort of the way we think of a signature today.”
There are fragments in museum collections similar to the Ringling’s “priestess,” but no full-bodied sculpture like her preserved anywhere else.
“A colleague at The Metropolitan says to me all the time, ‘I’m so sorry we sold the piece,’” Smith said.
“Ancient Art from Cyprus and the Mediterranean,” part of a larger reinstallation project re-envisioning all The Ringling’s galleries, opens to the public on October 11, 2025.