GREAT ART collections, like great fortunes and empires, are often forged out of avarice, lust, tenacity and a craving for fame and glory. Unlike great fortunes or kingdoms, however, art treasures are often bequeathed to posterity as a public trust, a legacy of beauty donated to perpetuate an owner's name.

When Grenville L. Winthrop, class of 1886, died in 1943, he left to Harvard the contents of his four story New York townhouse where since 1919 he had assiduously nurtured a beloved and burgeoning board of art works. The dedicated scholar or the graduate student in Harvard's Museum Course who was invited to the house at 15 East 81st Street would have been ushered into the still and rarefied atmosphere of a crowded private gallery by a grave and reserved Victorian gentleman, his dignified features adorned by a shining pince-nez perched above a neatly dressed moustache and small beard.

Inside, the visitor saw drawings by Ingres, Delacroix, and Homer, 17th and 18th century British and French paintings, clocks and ceramics, pre-Colombian stone idols and ancient Chinese bronzes and jades, all placed with sedulous care on walls and in special cases.

Heir to comfortable if not princely means, Winthrop's one abiding passion was his treasures. His wedded life less than joyous, and estranged from his two daughters by his refusal to bless their marriages. Winthrop loved best the private contemplation of his paintings and carvings. But he also felt a strong obligation to posterity. In his reply to a request from the Smithsonian Institution that he leave his collection to the nation. Winthrop said, "I am not so much interested in the general public as I am in the Younger Generation whom I want to reach in their impressionable years..." Winthrop felt he could best fulfill his ambition at Harvard and he became the Fogg Art Museum's greatest benefactor.

Shortly after Winthrop's death the over 3700 objects in his New York apartment were transported to the Fogg to be stored for the duration of the war. For the first time since 1943 the museum is exhibiting Winthrop's entire collection of ancient Chinese jades. The exhibition seems to have been designed with Winthrop in mind and it reveals much about what he sought as a collector. Daniel Robbins, in the foreword to Max Loehr's completely illustrated, scholarly catalogue of the exhibition, remarks that Winthrop "believed in an artistic faculty essentially independent of time and place; he also felt that the making of beautiful and perfect objects utterly transcended their function in a strictly utilitarian sense as evidence of a way of life." The more than four hundred jades in the collection date from the Neolithic period (to ca. 1550 B.C.) to the Late Eastern Chou dynasty (480-222 B.C.) and they are presented with a minimum of historical or stylistic explanation. In case after case these beautiful and mysterious objects speak eloquently of a culture's skill and sensitivity.

YU. THE CHINESE word for jade, was applied to a variety of stones, all extremely hard, which were shaped and polished by the slow and painstaking process of grinding down with an abrasive, usually quartz, sand and water. Nephrite, the material most commonly used in the early periods, takes on a smooth, oily luster and can possess an extraordinary range of colors. The bright green, glassy jadeite, the substance most people think of when they think of jade, was not used extensively until the 18th century. Neither substance is indigenous to China; nephrite had to be imported from East Turkestan and Siberia and jadeite was carried from Burma. Jades were precious and exotic materials and were revered by the Chinese as substances possessing special moral as well as physical attributes.

The artist's reverence for the subtle peculiarities of his material is a characteristic of all the jades exhibited. The basic vocabulary of jade shapes was established very early in the Neolithic and Shang periods and for the next millenium generated a seemingly endless language of creative inspiration. The oldest jade carvings are flat, rounded pi disks ranging in size from a foot to a few inches with circular perforations, and ritual reproductions of Neolithic stone tools such as axes, chisels and knives, and of Bronze Age weapons like dagger-axes and spearheads.

The origins and ritual meanings of the pi disks and the objects called ts'ung, hollow cylinders encased in square tubes, remain recondite enigmas, even to scholars. Pi disks are often mentioned as symbols of Heaven and as proper offerings to the mountains and the rivers. Staring at these primeval shapes and the infinitely various shades and mixtures of colors--pure glossy black tinged with red and gold, pinks mottled by swirling streams of yellow, bolts of orange running through beige and brown--it is not difficult to see them as symbols of a world without form filled only with a fertile atmosphere of water and air and the incipient shapes of mountains.

IN LATER PERIODS, birds and animals appear as small statuettes carved in the round and as geometricized plaques, and pendants. Shapes become more intricate, the number of carved and polished edges attesting to the virtuosity of the craftsman. Pi disks are adorned with raised spirals and the ornamental design of an object becomes interesting in itself as a thing independent of the material in which it is carved. New shapes are introduced and a twisting sinuous motion begins to pervade carvings of dragons and felines but the older, more severe forms still exercise a tremendous hold on the Chinese imagination.

Despite barriers of time, religion and culture, Winthrop sensed qualities of harmony, integrity and tradition in ancient Chinese jades that made him cherish them above his other possessions. His legacy to us is his insight and sensitivity, both of which are amply displayed in the Fogg's tribute to their patron.