NEW YORK.- More than 80 medieval sculpted heads - half from the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and half selected loans from American and European collections - are the focus of the upcoming exhibition Set in Stone: The Face in Medieval Sculpture, opening on September 26. The exhibition, which includes heads from the third century A.D. through the early 1500s, will consider such artistic and thematic issues as: iconoclasm and the legacy of violence, sculpting identity and the evolving notions of the "portrait," sculpture without context and the search for provenance, head reliquaries as power objects, and Gothic Italy and the antique. Created from materials as diverse as marble, limestone, polychromed wood, and silver gilt, the works represent mostly French, but also German, Italian, Spanish, Byzantine, English, and other sculptural traditions. By examining the works in different ways, the exhibition will raw together science and connoisseurship, archaeology and history. On view will be a recently acquired 13th-century limestone Head of an Angel, related to the sculpture from the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.

The exhibition is made possible by The Florence Gould Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Michel David-Weill Fund.

Exhibition Overview: The exhibition, which is arranged thematically, will begin with sculptural heads that were intentionally removed from the bodies of sculpture during periods of iconoclasm. As an example, monumental figures on the façade of Notre-Dame were systematically destroyed or beheaded by government edict during the French Revolution. Just as the king was subjected to the guillotine, the sculptures - seen as symbols of authority - were destroyed in parallel acts of vengeance. An outstanding example is the regal 13th-century limestone Head of a King, originally from Notre-Dame in Paris, which still bears traces of polychromy (Musée National du Moyen Âge, Thermes et Hôtel de Cluny). Because historical events isolated these objects from their original settings, they became objects that could be collected, and objects whose lost histories curators and scholars would hope to recover.

Frequently, sculpted heads have been separated from their original contexts for so long that researchers cannot determine with accuracy where the works were made. The exhibition will include a section on Neutron Activation Analysis, a scientific technique that has been used to document the chemical composition of stone from approximately 2600 sculptures, churches, and quarries to date. This new methodology - in use since being pioneered by the Metropolitan Museum in the 1970s - utilizes the geological "fingerprint" of the stone. By means of this methodology, it was recently determined that another mid-13th-century Angel Head, which has been in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum since 1990, probably came either from the cathedral of Notre-Dame or another 13th-century Parisian church that used the same quarry.
Heads representing figures from the Bible will be grouped together in a third exhibition area, entitled "The Stone Bible." Most of the figures in this area once adorned churches and cathedrals, and their identities - or original locations - were established on the basis of historical records, such as engravings. A highlight of this section is the moving and extremely realistic late-15th-century limestone Head of Christ (The Metropolitan Museum of Art). The limestone crown of thorns was carved with small holes that once held actual thorns.

Ornamental heads were frequently used along the margins of church architecture and furniture for purely decorative - and sometimes even humorous - reasons. A surprising example is the delicately carved bearded male head on the 14th-century oak misericord - the ledge on the underside of a hinged seat that provides support to one standing - from Wells Cathedral (Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution).

The faces on many medieval heads are often extremely generalized, but some include details so specific that they must have depicted actual people. The exhibition will include portrait heads from the third century through the early 16th century, enabling the viewer to track changes in ways of representing a particular human face. A highlight is the tender image of the young princess Marie de France carved of marble in 1381 A.D. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art). Her elegantly coiffed head was once adorned with jewels.

The relationship between medieval sculptural heads and those of Italian antiquity will be explored in a small grouping. Of special interest is the exquisitely detailed and beautifully preserved 13th-century marble Crowned Bust of a Woman (Museo del Duomo di Ravello). Carved either as the portrait of a noblewoman or as the personification of the Church or of the city of Ravello, it eventually received a place of honor in an ecclesiastical setting, and was placed on top of the pulpit of the cathedral in Ravello.

The exhibition will conclude with a grouping of a dozen objects of devotion, including head reliquaries, in which the head - separate from the body - is venerated as part of a cult of a saint. Noteworthy is the rare and beautiful 13th-century silver Reliquary Head of St. Yrieix, which is ornamented with cabochon stones (The Metropolitan Museum of Art). This work will be displayed beside an identical head sculpted of wood - never intended to be seen - that cradled the skull of the saint and served as the core for the silver repoussé reliquary.

The exhibition is organized by Charles T. Little, Curator, in the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, and is planned in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of The International Center of Medieval Art, which is headquartered at The Cloisters.