News: Sculptor’s stone ‘Gilgamesh’ is installed at Mineralogical Museum
by Alvin Powell, Harvard Staff Writer
October 11, 2012
oet David Ferry had just finished his English translation of “The Epic of Gilgamesh” in 1993 when he walked into the studio of sculptor and Harvard Professor Dimitri Hadzi. A stone sculpture there caught Ferry’s eye, and he asked Hadzi if he could use an image of it on his upcoming book cover.
Hadzi said yes and went a step further, naming the abstract sculpture “Gilgamesh,” after the ancient king of Uruk, tested by the gods in a search for immortality.
Cynthia Hadzi said the statue was a favorite of her husband, who died in 2006. Another favorite of his was Harvard’s Mineralogical and Geological Museum, which he visited regularly for meetings of the Boston Mineralogical Club. So it made sense to her to bring the two together.
“We’d always held onto it as a favorite of his,” she said of the statue. “I felt it needed to be seen by more people.”
Now “Gilgamesh” stands just outside the Mineralogical and Geological Museum’s doorway, in the courtyard between the museum and the Tozzer Library.
Hadzi was a renowned sculptor as well as a professor in Harvard’s Visual and Environmental Studies Department. He worked mostly in bronze, though not exclusively. Examples of his work stand in museums and public spaces around the world. Locally, there is “Omphalos,” in gray and red granite, in Harvard Square, and “Thermopylae,” in bronze, outside the John F. Kennedy Federal Building in Boston.
