Fordham Road is jazzy to the point of being honky-tonk. It brings to mind Times Square in all its triumphant mid-century glory, when that rough-and-tumble place was continually mobbed and kinetically alive.

But as you head west from Grand Concourse along Fordham Road, you come suddenly upon an oasis of peace, the stately, gated campus of Fordham University. And practically the first building you see as you enter is the 10-year-old William D. Walsh Family Library, which, as of this past week, also houses the Fordham Museum of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Art. The new museum consists almost entirely of the collection of William D. Walsh, who graduated from Fordham in 1950 with a degree in Latin and Greek. He has contributed nearly 200 objects to the university, all of them obtained at auction over the past few decades.

This thoughtfully acquired collection seems to argue for the stille Groesse, or silent grandeur, that the 18th-century German aesthetician Winckelmann saw as the defining attribute of ancient art. It is hard to imagine a more striking contrast to the subway and Fordham Road than mute marble portrait busts of Rome, or the coins and pottery of Athens or Syracuse.

This large, single-room museum is displayed in old-fashioned wood-framed cases that recall some late 19th-century university collection in Germany. Indeed, this museum, with its austere cases and its clear, no-nonsense captions, takes us back to a more earnest era.

In keeping with the décor, the assembled artifacts shy away from the imperious brilliance of the Getty’s collection of antiquities or the new Leon Levy and Shelby White Court at the Metropolitan Museum. Rather, the Walsh collection, both in its general dimensions and in the specific objects on view, is a far humbler and more intimate affair.

Mr. Walsh has an excellent eye and has collected well. The objects are varied, interesting, and in fine condition and of a generally high quality. A case in point is a vividly sculpted marble portrait bust of Julia Aquilia Severa from around 220 common era. This work, the first you see as you enter the museum, is a finely preserved portrait of a relative of the emperor Septimius Severus. The faintest whiff of generality qualifies the precisely rendered specifics of her face.

A similar effect is achieved, this time in clay, in an Etruscan head from Falerii that dates to around 400 before the common era. Unlike other Etruscan works on view at the museum, such as the polychrome antefix, or roof ornament, of a kneeling maiden from 100 years earlier, here the powerful modeling of the young man’s head imbues it with an almost portrait-like specificity that is very different from the lofty generality that characterizes most of the sculptures of Greece.

Much, if not most, of the work at the museum is ceramic, whether portraiture, pottery, votive offerings, or statuettes of some minor deity. The collection is especially rich in pottery. One noteworthy example is an Attic red-figure kylix, or stemmed drinking cup, that depicts a running Dionysus from around 520 B.C.E. Fifty years later an inspired artisan made another fine specimen of Attic red-figure pottery, this time a crater or mixing bowl, depicting a departure scene.

Some of the most compelling works, however, are far simpler and far older, such as several Villanovan vases that were produced in Central Italy hundreds of years before the Romans arrived. At the other extreme are the richly theatrical scenes painted onto the Sicilian ceramics in the Alexandrian age.

An hour spent among these delicate and imperishable objects just might be preparation enough for a return to Fordham Road and that riot of reality that is contemporary New York.

441 E. Fordham Rd., Bronx, 718-817-1000.