I must confess to a certain smugness as the debate regarding the removal of Confederate statuary has taken on an aesthetic perspective. For years, I have endured the tacit, passive-aggressive notion from some newspaper colleagues and even bosses that my job as a cultural writer was not as important as those of the political and municipal writers and even the sports reporters. (Indeed, I lost that job partly because it was considered of lesser significance.)

But the arts – somewhat like religion and the family – are the refuge of the desperate and the inconsolable. Unfortunately for the arts, they are a refuge that their seekers often do not fully understand.

Some of my colleagues in my present job as an editor wonder about the artistic value that may be lost in the removal of the Confederate statues. No less an art lover than President Donald J. Trump bemoaned “the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks.”

But are these works beautiful and, more to the point, are they art? ...

One of my – and my family’s – Christmas gifts to myself was a trip to “Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World,” which is at the National Gallery of Art through March 20.

For me, an amateur classicist whose love of Greco-Roman culture threads all of my writing, “Power and Pathos” in Washington was something of a Holy Grail. It originated at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles – one of two big shows on the ancient Greeks to appear this year, the other being “The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece” at the British Museum.

But neither London nor Los Angeles was in my game plan and when my annual Christmas trip to Washington arrived, so did my moment.

That moment didn’t disappoint, for no sooner did my photographing nephew and I enter the exhibit than we encountered “Alexander the Great on Horseback,” a small first century B.C. silver-inlaid bronze replica of the bronze original by Lysippos, the only artist allowed to capture Alexander’s likeness besides the painter Apelles and the gem-carver Pyrgoteles. The backdrop for this equestrian statue is a reproduced portion of “The Alexander Mosaic” (circa 100 B.C.), depicting the Greco-Macedonian conqueror’s defeat of the Persian emperor Darius III at the Battle of Issus. (Both works are in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples.) ...

The statues of limitations

Greek to us: ‘Power and Pathos’ at the National Gallery of Art