Writing about a Greek marble head in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts seen during his 1904-5 visit to the States, Henry James said it had been well worth crossing the Atlantic to see the genius of ancient Greece in American light. “[T]o the raffiné of almost any other clime,” he wrote, “I should say . . . that he has not seen a fine Greek thing till he has seen it in America.” In the daylight-flooded, circular upper gallery of the Lehman wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, visitors to an exhibition of forty-eight original Greek marbles and bronzes from the sixth to early fourth centuries B.C. can judge for themselves the aptness of such a notion today. “The Greek Miracle: Classical Sculpture from the Dawn of Democracy”¹ is the first major loan exhibition of Greek antiquities in New York since “The Search for Alexander,” with its works from fourth-century B.C. Macedonia, opened at the Met in October 1982.

Twenty-two of the objects are from museums in Greece and ten from European collections: the Louvre, the British Museum, the Munich Glyptothek, the Antikensammlung of Berlin, and the Capitoline Museum in Rome. Apart from three small works lent by private New York collectors, the significant number remaining (thirteen) belong to the Met itself. It is to be hoped that one of the corollaries of this exhibition will be the recognition that there are a few more than two original works of