THEATER

Trent Kowalik as Billy Elliot takes his first guarded balletic steps under the scrutiny of Mrs. Wilkinson (Haydyn Gwynne). Photos: Carol Rosegg

Young Billy and his adult self (Stephen Hanna, late of the New York City Ballet) dance so sublimely to Swan Lake that Terpsichore herself must be smiling down at every performance.

Billy Elliot the Musical
Imperial
249 W. 45th St.
212-239-6200

Billy Elliot is beyond “glorious.” It is a feast for the eyes, ears and soul. I’m getting the chills just thinking about perhaps the most spectacular piece of choreography since Susan Stroman’s rooftop dance in Crazy for You and Jerome Robbins’s “Rumble” in West Side Story. I speak of Solidarity, a choreographic masterpiece by Peter Darling that simultaneously integrates striking coal miners, riot police, a dance class of tutu-clad little girls and of course Billy himself. If you’re not familiar with the plot, I suggest you first rent the wonderful 2000 movie which boasts not solely Peter Darling as choreographer, but Stephen Daldry as director and Lee Hall as screenwriter, all of whom have the same responsibilities for the musical. Hall goes a step further as lyricist to Elton John’s (surprising to me) spot-on score, patently worthy of knighthood. As I’m sure you’re aware, there are three young teens rotating as Billy (owing to the stamina the role requires, not to mention child-labor considerations). Of the three, only Trent Kowalik whom we had the good fortune of seeing, has played the role before, in London's West End, where he perfected his Newcastle-upon-Tyne "Geordie" dialect that belies his Long Island roots. Kowalik is so winning, so intrinsic to the action, so extraordinarily versatile in song and dance, that I’m hard-pressed to conceive of the other two being as accomplished (which of course they surely must be). So too, must be the two performers who play Michael, Billy’s exuberantly saucy friend who loves to dress up in girls’ clothes. “Our Michael” was played by Frank Dolce, who showed his mettle by not sacrificing a step when he lost his dancing shoe during an ensemble tap number. Special praise for Haydn Gwynne, who created the role of Mrs. Wilkinson, Billy’s ballet instructor, in London, a cross between Roz Russell’s Auntie Mame and Elaine Stritch - and Gregory Jbara as Billy’s uncomprehending coal miner Dad who becomes as supportive of the boy’s efforts as we mesmerized audience members. (For additional dance reviews, Click here: My Kind of New York - Grand Times With Your Grandkids - November 2008).

(L-R) Cedric the Entertainer, Haley Joel Osmont and John Leguizamo in the revival of David Mamet’s American Buffalo.

American Buffalo
Belasco
111 W. 44th St.
212-239-6262
Closed November 23rd

The revival of David Mamet’s story of three petty crooks, conspiring to steal a valuable coin from a neighborhood collector, is better this time around than the version I saw in 1981 with Al Pacino as the incendiary street-smart “Teach.” As I recall the staging (I tried Googling the name of the off-Broadway theater, to no avail) Pacino was confined to a tiny stage that was a either a “thrust” or in the round in which he stalked around like a caged panther, driving me to distraction. In this intelligent revival, the great Chicago-based director Robert Falls liberates both John Leguizamo as Teach and Cedric the Entertainer as the junk-shop owner Donny, in an expansive junk-strewn set designed by the eminent Santo Loquasto. The set brought to mind Michael Brown’s stunning piece of stage-craft from the 1999 revival of Arthur Miller’s The Price starring Bob Dishy. Cedric and Leguizamo, stand-up comics both, play off of each other beautifully. They are abetted by Haley Joel Osment as the dim-witted gofer Bobby. A fresh viewing reminds one of how much last season’s Mauritius, a play about philatelic chicanery, owes to this numismatic comic-drama.

Laura Odeh (Wren), Christine Lahti (Avis) and  Michael Cristofer (Moss),  are the enigmatic triangle in Lee Blessing’s intriguing play A Body of Water.

A Body of Water
59 E. 59 Theaters
59 E. 59th St .
212-279-4200
Last Performance Nov. 16.

It is still relatively early but this Primary Stages drama-comique may wind up being the most enigmatic, perplexing, mind-boggling play of the season, a credit to the inspired writing of Lee Blessing, the tidy direction of Maria Mileaf, the imaginative set design of Neil Patel and the superlative performances of Christine Lahti, actor/playwright Michael (Shadow Box) Cristofer and a gifted young actress, Laura Odeh. Lahti and Cristofer are a married couple who awaken to find themselves in a country home surrounded by water, each with no inkling of who their opposite number is and no sense of how in the hell they got there. Rather than being traumatized, they intellectualize their curious state, often comically, while evincing an uneasy physical attraction to one another. Enter Odeh as Wren, who discloses the couple’s names, Moss and Avis, along with some extraordinary, albeit ambiguous, information which may (or may not) clear up the mystery. More I will not disseminate here, except to say that my “take” on the narrative was the polar opposite of Primary Stage’s scholarly press agent Philip Carrubba.

A Tale of Two Cities
Al Hirschfeld Theater
302 W. 45th St.
Closed Nov. 16

In the genre of musical sound-alikes and ramparts–charging pyrotechnics, an oeuvre that includes Anna Karenina, Jane Eyre, and Jekyll and Hyde, Dickens’ Tale fails to catch the lightning in a battle of Les Misérables. To give it its due, I expected a far, far lesser thing from the earnest, crowd-pleasing performers who gave of themselves to an enthralled out-of-town audience. Any musical that has Gregg Edelman in the cast has something going for it. Here he is as Dr. Alexandre Manette who has spent years incarcerated in the Bastille. In 1992, Edelman as Stephen Oblonsky played opposite Melissa Errico as Anna Karenina. James Barbour, who portrays the dissipated, incongruously self-sacrificing hero Sydney Carton, played the abusive Rochester in the 2000 Broadway musical of Jane Eyre .

All My Sons
Gerald Schoenfeld Theater
236 W. 45th St.
212-239-6200
Through Jan. 11, 2009

This out-sized production by one of Europe’s higher profile experimental directors, Simon McBurney, who employs rear projection sets and high decibel music, cannot mask the fact that the 1947 play remains in the nether regions of Arthur Miller’s output, certainly not close to the exalted ranks of Death of a Salesman, The Crucible or even The Price. What it has going for it, is that the main character, Joe Keller, played by John Lithgow, presages Willy Loman. Keller was an airplane parts manufacturer during WWII – the kind that Senator Harry Truman and his tenacious investigative committee might have tracked down for turning out faulty parts at obscene prices. Like Loman, Keller is diminished in the eyes of his adoring son Chris, a former fighter pilot (Patrick Wilson), as was Loman vis-a-vis his two sons. The distinction is that Death of a Salesman’s Willy, though not born of high station, in my view fits the Aristotelian concept of a tragic hero, one who evokes pity and fear from its audience (pity for the protagonist, fear it can happen to you). The acting ranges from surprisingly good (Katie Holmes as Chris’s fiancée) to workmanlike (Lithgow and Wilson) to cloying (Dianne Wiest) to dreadful (Jordan Gelber and Danielle Ferland as buffoonish next-door neighbors.)

Frank Langella (seated) is Sir Thomas More, Patrick Page is King Henry VIII
in A Man for All Seasons. Photo: Joan Marcus.

A Man for all Seasons
American Airlines Theater
227 W. 42nd St.
212-239-6200
Through Dec. 14

The Roundabout Theater production of Robert Bolt’s biodrama has the imposing presence of Frank Langella in the title role of Sir Thomas More who dared to stare down Henry VIII, the king who repudiated Catholicism to justify his predilection for taking a succession of wives. In a recent gathering of my wife’s and my play-reading friends, the script held up extremely well. To a person, we summoned up intimations of Paul Scofield’s irreducible identification with More in both the 1960s play and movie. This performance is worthy of your attention, not solely for Langella’s fastidious interpretation, but for the portrayals of More’s wife Alice by Maryann Plunkett and Henry VIII by Patrick Page. Indeed, the high point of the evening was the spirited and witty verbal exchange between Langella and Page.

Maura Tierney as Laurel in Playwrights Horizons’ Three Changes .
Photo: Joan Marcus

Three Changes
Playwrights Horizon Main Stage
Final Performance Oct. 2

As ER’s Abby Lockhart, Maura Tierney for nine years may have been its most important cast member since George Clooney opted out of the series. She was the glue that barely held together Nickey Silver’s unconvincing play which had a limited run at the Main Stage. Laurel and Nate ( Dylan McDermott late of TV’s The Practice) are an Upper West Side Manhattan couple, who are essentially invaded by Nate’s long-lost brother Hal (Scott Cohen) who has known success and abject failure as a Hollywood writer, and his boyfriend and street hustler Gordon (Brian J. Smith). Just as assuredly as a fresh-faced Paul Newman took over Karl Malden’s family at gunpoint in the 1955 play The Desperate Hours, so too does Nate eerily insinuate himself into the life, identity and marital relationship of Nate and Laura with less unpredictable results.

Devon White as “Son” (standing left) gives his mother Stella (Elizabeth Ashley, in pink sweater), Hallie Foote as Mary Jo (third from right) and the rest of the family a reality check about the state of the estate. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Dividing the Estate
Booth
222 W, 45 th St.
212-239-6200

I have followed 92-year-old playwright Horton Foote’s career from the early days of “live”television, when his plays were – along with those of Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky - staples of Studio One and Playhouse 90. He wrote the screenplays of two notable movies for which he received Oscars: an adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird with the incomparable Gregory Peck and the original script of Tender Mercies with Robert Duvall and Tess Harper. A Texan by origin, and presently a New Yorker, in these, his vintage years, Foote has written more than 60 plays, most of which are set in the Texas town of Harrison, as is Dividing the Estate. I cannot think of any Foote play I would regard as belonging in the rarefied stratosphere of such American dramatists as Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, O’Neill, Albee or Inge. In 1995, Foote received a Pulitzer Prize for The Young Man from Atlanta, a drama that I thought was utterly inconsequential. Thanks in large part to a commanding performance by Lois Smith, the revival two years ago of Foote’s A Trip to Bountiful had considerable merit. A year ago his Dividing the Estate was performed off-Broadway to much acclaim, hence its arrival at the Booth Theater under the auspices of Lincoln Center Theater, where its present critical reviews have been uniformly outstanding. Given the state of the economy, the play – which takes place in 1987, a time when land and home values also plummeted - has even more relevance than it did a year ago – with its large cast of siblings and in-laws squabbling over what each considers his or her rightful share of the vast farmland acreage – bought on the cheap by a prescient ancestor. Of the uniformly competent cast, including Hallie Foote, a perennial of her father’s plays, I most admired Elizabeth Ashley as the funny and assertive matriarch, Stella. I first saw Ashley in 1982 with Amanda Plummer in Agnes of God. Stella’s son is played by Devon Abner with intelligence and restraint, the one member of the dysfunctional (there’s that adjective again) family, who maintains the estate’s books with healthy doses of reality and integrity.

Boleros for the Disenchanted
The Huntington Theater Company
264 Huntington Ave.
Boston, MA 02115
617-266-0800

In a recent visit to Boston, we joined our friends Maxine and Don Goldberg at a theatrical at The Huntington, an admirable theater complex with wonderful sightlines, and spacious seating and foot room. I noticed that The Corn is Green with Kate Burton will be playing there in early 2009 which I would dearly love to see. Unfortunately this particular play– to borrow from Dorothy Parker - runs the gamut of emotions and comedy from A to B. It deals with a Puerto Rican family weighing the opportunities or drawbacks of staying on the Island in Miraflores vs. locating stateside in the course of 40 years. The concept has been expressed more artfully in seconds in Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics for the song America in West Side Story: “Puerto Rico, you lovely island, island of tropical breezes, Puerto Rico, you ugly island, island of tropic diseases.”

Kristin Scott-Thomas as Arkadina in Chekov’s The Seagull.
Photo: Joan Marcus

The Seagull
Walter Kerr Theater
219 W. 48th St.
212-239-6200
Through Dec. 21

It is impossible not to admire the stage presence and beauty of Kristin Scott Thomas whose accolades as the aging, vain actress Arkadina from London critics were doubled and re-doubled by Ben Brantley of the NY Times. Coincident with her Broadway debut, her virtuosity as an accomplished cinema actress has never been more evident than in the two French films I’ve reviewed below. Whereas Brantley lauded Scott Thomas and by inference, director Ian Rickson, for not taking over the stage, my sense is that given Arkadina’s ego-driven star status, I would have welcomed a bit more take-charge on Scott Thomas’s part , in the face of the ennui-inducing Chekovian dialogue and the wooden performances of a few of the family members in the cast. Especially disappointing is Mackenzie Crook as Arkadina’s fragile, aspiring playwright son Konstantin who lives at the lakeside estate of her ailing older brother Sorin, played with relish and athleticism belying his portliness, by Peter Wight. In the all-important role of her younger lover and fiction writer Trigorin is the American Peter Sarsgaard who is also making his Broadway debut and does so impressively. Another American, who played in Come Back Little Sheba last season, Zoe Kazan, is excellent in the small, but pivotal role of Masha.

MOVIES

Kristin Scott Thomas and François Cluzet in Tell No One.

Tell No One. Not since The Usual Suspects and before that, North by Northwest, have I encountered a movie that surprises and satisfies as adroitly as this 2006 French thriller. Written and directed by Guillaume Canet , it follows a widowed murder suspect François Cluzet as Alex Beck who ( a la Hitchock’s Cary Grant,) is on the run after receiving an eerie E -mail containing a webcam of a woman who just may be his … (we won’t spoil it for you). Beck is a kindly Paris pediatrician who – important to the plot - saves the life of the hemophiliac son of a gangster (Gilles Lellouche). Cluzet has the Gallic good looks and savoir-faire of the two Jeans, Gabin and Belmondo. I cannot wait to rent the DVD to see it a second time. Oh, and Kristin Scott Thomas, equally at home with French or English dialogue, is Alex’s confidante, Hélène as well as the wealthy lover of his reticent younger sister, Anne ( Marina Hands). According to the movie’s estimable press agent Sophie Gluck, Tell No One, is the highest grossing foreign language film of the year. The DVD and Blu-Ray are expected to be out in the first quarter of 2009. English subtitles.

Kristin Scott Thomas is Juliette in I’ve Loved You So Long .

I’ve Loved You So Long. This gripping new French film written and directed by Philippe Claudel, is consumed by the murder of a six year old boy, ostensibly by the child’s mother, Juliette played with stultifying composure by, yes, Kristin Scott Thomas. Released after serving 15 years, an ashen-faced Juliette moves into the household of her caring younger sister Léa (Elsa Zylberstein), a college literature instructor who has spent little of her adult life with her - and her loving husband Luc (Serge Hazanavicius) who understandably, is not inclined to leave Juliette in the company of his and Léa’s two young adopted daughters. What Juliette purportedly did is veiled from her nieces and Luc’s and Léa’s friends. There are the inevitable flashbacks of mother and child, punctuating the audience’s dilemma as to whether Juliette is penitent, innocent, or a calculating fiend. The movie is justifiably rated PG-13. English subtitles.

A Secret. Growing up in Paris in the ‘50s, François is the sickly son of two athletically gifted parents. To compensate for his feelings of inadequacy, he dreams up an older brother, Simon, who is talented both physically and socially. The “discovery” of this real or imagined sibling reveals deep-rooted ambiguities surrounding his mother and father Tania (Cécile de France) and Maxime (Patrick Bruel) A friend and neighbor Louise, brilliantly portrayed by Julie Depardieu – (daughter of the great French actor Gérard) - while giving François massages and vitamin treatments, informs how Maxime and Tania – as Jews - met, married and were victimized during the Nazi occupation. François is played as a 7-year old by Valentin Vigourt , a 14-year old a by Quentin Dubuis, and as a grown man in the 1980s, by Mathieu Amalric. English subtitles.

Happy-Go-Lucky. I recently had a second viewing of Brit director Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake, its disarming sweetness and honesty shining through the title character, a selflessly naïve, back-alley abortionist, played with uncommon naturalness by Imelda Staunton who secured an Oscar nomination. Much of the dialogue in a Leigh movie stems from improvisatory rehearsals, a la HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. Yet, such an approach can backfire. Under the opening credits of Happy-Go-Lucky, Sally Hawkins as Poppy cycles joyously through the streets of London— and I believe the tone of the movie is set, with perhaps some of the storybook feel of Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. Alas, no. Poppy is as wired as a bucket of lattes, whether bouncing around a decibel-piercing dance club, taking flamenco lessons, learning to drive with an irascible instructor, or dealing dangerously with a wasted homeless man in a completely meaningless scene. Happy Go Lucky? Even Ted Lewis might have found it lamentable.

Mathieu Amalric as Henri is the reel thing in
Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale.

A Christmas Tale. Not since last year’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, have I been so transfixed by a movie of such patent ingenuity, humor, and intelligence. It is no accident that the prime character – the most irresistibly iconoclastic member of a family immersed in dysfunctionalism –Henri -played by Mathieu Amalric, also portrayed the irrepressibly sanguine stroke victim in Diving Bell. As the family black sheep, Henri is “banished” by an unforgiving sister, Élizabeth ( Anne Consigny ) in exchange for her paying off his debts. As Henri’s and Élizabeth’s mother, Junon Vuillard, Catherine Deneuve, still gorgeous after all these years, has never been in better form. She and her partner in marriage, and subordinate in decision-making, the amiable Jean-Paul Roussillon as Abel Vuillard are a formidable vintage pair. She accepts with stoic detachment the news that she is afflicted with the same incipient cancer that killed hers and Abel’s young son. Her remote hope for survival is a bone marrow transplant, as one by one, her children and grandchildren are found to be unsuitable donors Space prevents me from mentioning all of the superb ensemble players, save for Chiara Mastroianni as Sylvia, a Vuillard daughter-in-law – hauntingly one-face to her father Marcello, which ain’t so bad, were it not for her also being the offspring of mother Catherine Deneuve. The neat narrative penned by Arnaud Desplechin reels and lurches between absurdist comedy and crises, culminating in a Christmas gathering, redolent of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, Running time is 2 ½ hours and could do with about 20 minutes of judicious pruning. English subtitles.

Religulous. During the election season, Bill Maher’s Friday nights on HBO, with his Real Time show, were something I looked forward to with relish during the run-up to the election. Yes, there would be tactless laughs and narcissistic forays, but for the better part of the hour he and most of his guests served up their views on the Union’s indelicate state with humor and erudition. As for this lame documentary on the foibles of organized religion, would that Less were Maher.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona. This is Woody Allen’s most winning flick in years, finer than his 2005 Match Point which signaled he was back in stride. Working in Catalan country, rather than his familiar haunts in London and New York, he brings an Almodóvaran quality to the comedy, thanks in large part to the incendiary performances of Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem. Add to that the elegant English actress Rebecca Hall (daughter of stage director Peter) in the title role and to a lesser extent, a Woody favorite, Scarlett Johansson, and you have 97 minutes of civilized, liberating mirth. To the writer/director’s credit, he resists doing the voice-over, employing Christopher Evan Welch for the narrative role.

LIBRARIES
Reported by Slice of New York Arts Correspondents Maury Leon and Martha Halperin.

The Stadium
NY Daily News Photographs of Yankee Stadium
Final Exhibition Date Oct. 26
Print & Stokes Galleries, 3rd Floor
NY Public Library 5th Ave. @ 42nd St.
Final Exhibition Date Oct. 26
917-ASK-NYPL

This small gem of a show was composed of photographs of events held at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, from its construction to its demise.

Walking up the grand staircase, on the third floor left was the old ‘stuff,’ the photographs of our memory. All the characters of Yankee fame: Murderers’ Row, The Babe hitting one of his 46 home runs in 1924, The Iron Horse Lou Gehrig , Paul O’Neill atop a mound of Yankees after winning their first world series in nearly two decades (October, 1996); Max Schmeling decking The Brown Bomber Joe Louis on June 19, 1936; Darryl Strawberry’s first of two home runs in a win over the White Sox in August 1996; Bernie Williams catching a ball in a game against the Mets in 2005.

We are the sum-total of our memories. As a 10-year-old boy watching Jimmie Piersall and Walt Dropo playing for a Class A team in Pennsylvania through a knothole in the outfield fence, America’s pastime has remained indelibly imprinted in my mind. Photographs conjure up those memories, flooding the mind with nostalgia and dampening the eyes.

Not a Cough in a Carload
Science, Technology & Business Library
(NY Public Library)
Madison Ave. @ 34th St.
Healy Hall - Lower level
Through Dec. 26

Cigarette posters were regrettably ubiquitous from the early 1920s though the 1950s. The Library has arranged them by brand and chronology. Less known cigarette brands include Spuds and Wings.

The preponderance of posters speak to the “health benefit” of smoking cigarettes, often using medical doctors and scientists to attest to cigarettes’ value in dealing with stress. Familiar figures in entertainment and sports endorse smoking cigarettes, vouching for their safety and encouraging smoking as making a person more comfortable in social situations and/or dealing with everyday stress.

By the late 1930s there was growing evidence that smoking cigarettes caused lung cancer. German scientists had clearly established a definite link between smoking and cancer. Their research was known in the United States, certainly among scientists and researchers but not commonly known to the American public until the Reader’s Digest divulged the consequences of smoking in a series of Surgeon’s General reports. Though people were conscious of “smoker’s cough” and cigarettes were cavalierly called “coffin nails” but the labels had little effect on people for decades. What is encouraging, is that the most recent survey showed that under 20% of Americans still smoked, an all-time low.

ART DECO: DESIGN
The New York Public Library
Main Floor
Sue & Edgar Wachennheim III Gallery
Through Jan. 11, 2009

Art Deco is a fascinating small exhibit of a unique expression in design that took place in a 20-year period from the end of WWI to the beginning of the WWII. This period embraced experimentation and ‘different’ approaches in the arts. Music, literature, art, architecture and design emerged from the ashes of the First World War. Josephine Baker and Jazz, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, Pablo Picasso and Matisse, and others took up the mantel of the new age. Tradition and continuity as represented by the Viennese designer Joseph Hoffmann were dead and a new idiom, Art Deco, emerged to fill the void.

Deco was a decorative style offering a modern post WWI sensibility to design, instead of the rigid formalities of the past. Taking its root in modern culture, originating in France, then passing universally, it drove the cultural /artistic scene to embrace the new age of the machine and mechanics. Crossing national lines, it found a common home in France and Germany, England, Spain and the United States. Art Deco could be seen in the design of everyday products and fashion, in decorative arts and print, in cars and buildings.

MUSEUMS/GALLERIES

Simple rock crystal and quart necklace strung on silver wire from
Mesopotamia dating from 500 – 3100 B.C.E.

Cross Pendant of gold, pearls, emeralds, sapphires, garnet, spindle,
amethyst and colored glass from 6th–7th C.E. Byzantium

Masterpieces of Ancient Jewelry
Forbes Gallery
62 Fifth Avenue @ 12th St.
212-206-5548
Through Dec. 31
Reported by Maury Leon & Martha Halperin

The show features over 120 items dating from 3600 B.C.E. to 6th-7th C.E. On exhibit are pieces from the Near East, including Mesopotamia, the Levant, Persia, Byzantium and Islam . Each piece is elegant in design and meticulously crafted. The scope and combination of materials is astonishing. Many of the techniques used, such as granulation (the process of affixing small gold balls to a gold surface); filigree, engraving,and fusion welding are used today. Objects range from an exquisite necklace of limestone and shale from the Susa period in Mesopotamia’ 3600 – 310 B.C.E., a Necklace and Cross Pendant of gold, pearls, emeralds, sapphires, garnet, spindle, amethyst and colored glass from 6th–7th C.E. Byzantium, to a host of gold necklaces, plaques, bracelets, and ornamental items. Of particular beauty is a simple rock crystal and quart necklace strung on silver wire from Mesopotamia dating from 500 – 3100 B.C.E.

Two Cups and Saucers in the Form of Flowers.
Sèvres factory, France, ca. 1817

Royal Porcelain from the Twinight Collection,
1800-1850
Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue  
Reported by Slice of New York Arts Correspondent Nancy Treiger.
Through August 9, 2009

This exquisite exhibit of Royal Porcelain, is 1/10th of the Twinight Collection of Richard Baron Cohen, which in totality is considered to be one of the major repositories of early 1800s European porcelain. The production of this porcelain centered in  Berlin, Vienna, and Sevres in the early 1800s. The exhibit has been organized according to subject matter rather than factory of origin. Ancient history, contemporary events, the natural world and cityscapes were the chosen themes of the artists. Popular at the time was interest in scientific categorization of the natural world. This is depicted in the exacting detail of the painting of birds and flora.  The artists worked from prints, views of cities, landscapes, buildings and monuments. The accuracy of the work has become an important visual record of the period. Cameo carving was a revered art in ancient Greece and Rome.