Ancient art

The Worcester Art Museum has collected ancient Greek and Roman art from its founding in 1898 and has the largest US collection of Roman floor mosaics from the ancient city of Antioch on the Orontes (present-day Turkey). In the 1930s, the Worcester Art Museum participated in an extensive excavation of Antioch in collaboration with the Louvre Museum, Princeton University, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Wellesley College, and later the Fogg Museum and Dumbarton Oaks of Harvard University.

The collection has a small but distinguished selection of objects that range from large-scale Greek marble reliefs and black- and red-figure vases, an unusual Cypriot sculpture (Head of Aphrodite), as well as a variety of ancient glass and rare Roman imperial portraits.