thematic museum show, “Life & Death in the Ancient World,” an exhibition with a narrow-beam thesis that aims to shed new light on some aspect of art history—one of several planned long-term shows that draw on the permanent collections at the Tampa Museum of Art—is a reminder of the sort of “cabinet of curiosities” exhibitions that were once common in museums, allowing visitors to view a wide variety of superb objects across cultures and time while remaining within a particular area of study. With objects from across the Mediterranean, dating from 2,300 BCE to early in the Common Era, the exhibition (on display in the museum’s Lemonopoulos Gallery through 2026) is organized according to five themes : 1) daily life—including human and animal figures, everyday ceramics, metal tools and glassware, and portrayals of love and beauty ideals; 2) amusement—including theater and sports, wine production and consumption; 3) death and dying—including funerary vessels and fragments of sarcophagi; 4) religion—including illustrations of myths and rituals; and 5) power and trade—including warfare and seafaring, as well as two
