‘Tree Of Paradise’ Open

 At McMullen Museum

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Lion, from Hammam Lif, Tunisia Sixth Century AD, 295/16 by 42¼ inches, Brooklyn Museum; Museum Collection Fund.

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Date Palm Tree, from Hammam Lif, Tunisia, Sixth Century AD, 709/16 by 31 inches, Brooklyn Museum; Museum Collection Fund.

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Menorah, from Hammam Lif, Tunisia, Sixth Century, 227/16 by 35¼ inches, Brooklyn Museum; Museum Collection Fund.

Photos on CD sent down 2-6

Revised for date

MUST RUN 2/15

‘TREE OF PARADISE’ OPENS AT MCMULLEN FEB. 17 w/3 cuts

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CHESTNUT HILL, MASS. — The McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College is presenting “Tree of Paradise: Jewish Mosaics from the Roman Empire,” on view February through June 8.

According to the Brooklyn Museum, which organized the exhibition, it examines the role of Roman-period mosaics in the development of synagogue decoration in the late Roman Empire.

The exhibition presents the reconstruction of an ancient mosaic floor from a synagogue in Hammam Lif, Tunisia — the ancient town of Naro, later called Aquae Persianae by the Romans.

“Superbly conceived by the Brooklyn Museum to pose larger questions about links among various faith communities in Late Antiquity, this exhibition and its public programs draw on strengths of the Boston College faculty’s research and curriculum and on the university’s commitment to exploring the relationship among Jews, Christians and Muslims from antiquity to the present,” said McMullen Museum director and professor of art history Nancy Netzer.

A Latin inscription in one of the surviving panels records that the mosaic floor was a gift to the synagogue from a certain Julia, a resident of Naro in about 500 CE. Other mosaic panels in the exhibition, datable to the First or Second Century CE, originated either in an earlier part of the same synagogue or in a nearby buildings.

The mosaics were discovered by chance in 1883 by a French army captain, Ernest de Prudhomme, while preparing ground for gardening. In 1905, the Brooklyn Museum acquired most of the panels Prudhomme had owned and transported back to his home in Lyon.

Twenty-one mosaics — along with some 40 works from the Brooklyn Museum’s Roman art collection, including contemporary jewelry, coins, marble statues, ritual objects and textiles — shed light on the role of synagogues in the Diaspora during Late Antiquity, the development of Jewish art in the Roman period, the importance of female patrons in the ancient Jewish community, connections among early Christian, Jewish and Pagan symbolism in this period, and the relationship between ancient and modern understanding of the synagogue as an institution. The works of art included in the exhibition reveal a society where Jews were more integrated and accepted than ancient texts would suggest.

The exhibition also features nine Tiranz textiles from the Brooklyn Museum collection, which illuminate the role of Islam in North Africa in the Middle Ages.

A catalog by the exhibition’s curator, Edward Bleiberg, associate curator of Egyptian, Classical and Ancient Middle Eastern Art at the Brooklyn Museum, accompanies the exhibition.

The Museum is in Devlin Hall on Boston College’s Chestnut Hill campus, at 140 Commonwealth Avenue. For information, 617-552-8100 or www.bc.edu/artmuseum.