MONTREAL/February 3, 2004—
MONTREAL, February 3, 2004 ó Concordia University is pleased to host an international conference on the Diniacopoulos Family Collection of Greek and Roman Antiquities. The conference will be held on February 4 and 5 in room H-767 of the Henry F. Hall Building (1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West).
This event will bring together scholars to discuss one of the finest and most representative groupings of Greek and Roman antiquities in Canada. Forty objects will be on display beginning February 5, as part of the opening of the Galleries of Mediterranean Archaeology at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA). Among the topics presented at the conference are: the family and their collection, Greek vase painting, sculpture, conservation and reconstruction of pieces. Several of the conference presenters are also contributors to a publication on the Diniacopoulos collection in Quebec, edited by John Fossey of the MMFA and Concordia's professor of Classics, Jane Francis.
While the artifacts in the museum grouping represent a small segment of the family's original holdings, they show wide geographical and chronological spans. Material from ancient cultures of the central and western Mediterranean (Egypt and Syria to Greece, Italy, and Cyprus) dates from the Late Bronze Age through the Late Roman period of the 3rd-4th centuries C.E. Artifact types include Greek vases, Greek, Roman, and Egyptian sculpture, Greek epigraphy, and the minor arts, such as terracotta figurines, small-scale bronzes, and glass.
The antiquities collected by Olga and Vincent Diniacopoulos have a long history in the province, from the family's arrival in Montreal from France in 1951 with crates of art, to their subsequent exhibitions throughout the province, to the eventual deposition of a portion of the collection in the 1960s in the MusÈe national des beaux arts du Quèbec (MNBAQ). A selection of the works from the MNBAQ holdings have been placed on a ten-year loan to the MMFA.
The recent passing of Olga Diniacopoulos encouraged renewed interest in the collection, prompted in part by the family's important scholarship bequest to Concordia University - where their son, Denis, had long been a faculty member and where the family's archives are now housed.
Thus was conceived the Diniacopoulos Project, a collaborative effort between the Rector's Office, the Faculty of Arts & Science, the Department of Classics, Modern Languages and Linguistics, and the MMFA.
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