Ancient Gold Jewelry: at the Dallas Museum of Art

Prized for its beauty, its workability, and its resistance to corrosion or decay, gold in the ancient world was, as Pindar put it, "Zeus's child. Nothing erodes or consumes it. It conquers the mind of man and is the most powerful of possessions." Indeed, this lack of erosion means the 105 art objects shown in color photoraphs in this catalog are little changed from when they were created some two millennia ago. The Dallas Museum of Art acquired the Moretti collection of Mediterranean gold jewelry in the 1990s—one of the last significant collections in private hands. Among the superbly crafted gold and jeweled ornaments here are 4th-century BC Greek ear pendants with delicate figures of Eros dangling, Etruscan filigreed bracelets from the 7th century BC, and a pair of abstracted twist bracelets from 1st-century AD Rome that look contemporary.