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May 27, 2016

Published by The Bee Publishing Company, Newtown, Connecticut

INDEXES ON
PAGES 36 & 37

Pergamon

And The Hellenistic Kingdoms

Of The Ancient World
By James D. Balestrieri
NEW YORK CITY Antiquity is news. President Bashar al-Assads Syrian army who are
themselves responsible for the wholesale destruction of the heritage cities of Aleppo and
Homs retakes the ancient crossroads city of
Palmyra, rescuing the Greek, Roman and Persian
ruins from ruin at the hands, jackhammers and explosives
of the self-styled Islamic State. ISIS, ISIL, Daesh call it
what you will views any history not of its own writing
as idolatry, through the blood red mesh of an ideology
of violence. In other news, the United States Congress
passes a law forbidding the importation of artifacts from
Syria. Yet a December 4, 2015, New Yorker article, The
Real Value of the ISIS Antiquities Trade, cites scholars
in the field who contend that the assertion that there is
a billion-dollar market in illicit antiquities is severely
inflated, encouraging looters while aiming at legitimate
trade.
Meanwhile, in Londons Trafalgar Square, a scale
model replica of Palmyras Arch of Triumph built
by Emperor Septimius Severus at the beginning of the
Third Century CE to commemorate Romes victory over
the Parthians and blown to shards by ISIS is unveiled as
a gesture of cultural solidarity. Italian robots carved the arch
out of Egyptian marble from a 3D computer model compiled from
hosts of photographs. The arch will travel to New York in the fall and
elsewhere thereafter.
And then there are the people for whom antiquity is, or was, home.
The world of antiques and art is a world of objects. When we think
( continued on page 10C )
Calyx-crater (The Borghese Krater), Greek, Late Hellenistic period, 4030 BCE. Marble, height 67 inches.
Muse du Louvre, Paris. Image RMN-Grand Palais/
Art Resource, NY

Hair ornament with bust of Athena, Greek,

Hellenistic period, Second Century BCE,
found in Thessaly. Gold, red garnets and
blue enamel; diameter of roundel 43/8
inches. Benaki Museum, Athens

Diadem with Herakles knot (The Loeb Diadem), Greek, Hellenistic period, 200150
BCE. Gold, garnet, carnelian and sardonyx;
diameter 91/8 inches. Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich
Renate Khling photo

Statue of Athena Parthenos, Greek, Hellenistic period, circa 170 BCE; copy of
a mid-Fifth Century BCE chryselephantine cult statue of Athena Parthenos by
Pheidias. Marble, height (without base) 10 feet 2 inches by width 465/8 inches.
Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

10C Antiques and The Arts Weekly May 27, 2016

Small statue of Alexander the Great astride Bucephalus,

Roman, Late Republican or Early Imperial period, second
half of the First Century BCE; copy of a Greek original
of circa 320300 BCE. Bronze, height 191/8 by length 18
inches. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples

Statue of a Roman general (The Tivoli

General), Roman, late period, circa 8060
BCE. Marble, height 74 inches. Palazzo
Terme, Rome

Rhyton in the form of a centaur, Greek (Seleucid), Hellenistic period, circa 160 BCE.
Silver, partially gilt; height 85/8 inches. Discovered in Falerii Novi (Civit Castellana),
Italy, 1810. Antikensammlung, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Pergamon

And The Hellenistic

Kingdoms Of The
Ancient World

Weary Herakles, Greek, Hellenistic period, Third Century BCE, base early First
Century CE. Bronze and silver, height including base 153/8 by width 67/8 inches. Museo Archeologico Nazionale dAbruzzo Villa
Frigerj

( continued from page 1C )

Pair of armbands with triton and tritoness, Greek,

Hellenistic period, circa
200 BCE. Gold and silver,
height 97/8 and 103/8 inches.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Triton acroterion from
Pergamons Great Altar,
Greek, Hellenistic period,
circa 160 BCE. Marble.
Height with plinth 357/8
inches. Antikensammlung,
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Johannes Laurentius photo

of the people who made, used and owned the things we collect and cherish we
generally see them through a golden haze, as figures out of simpler times. To
approximate what the people of Palmyra or Aleppo are going through, imagine New York or Paris 2,000 years in the future, with the Empire State Building a crumbling but revered ruin and the Eiffel Tower a hologram. What will
those things mean to the people who live there? What would they mean if
those people found themselves in the middle of a civil war, beset and besieged
and, ultimately, fleeing for their lives?
Who owns history? The winners write it, they say, in fact meaning that the
winners obliterate it, appropriate it, melt it down, take it as spoils, preserve it,
absorb it, adopt it. But who owns it? Or, in other words, to whom does history
belong? Into the hubbub comes the indispensable exhibition Pergamon and
the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art through July 17, a display made possible by the temporary closing of
the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. The objects on view, more than 250 of them,
ask hard questions in myriad ways. The answers they offer are beautiful and,
at times, unsettling.
The Hellenistic period spans the years between the death of Alexander the
Great in 323 BCE in Babylon on his way back from conquering much of
India to the death of Cleopatra after the Battle of Actium in 30 BCE. After
Alexander, his successors, known as the Diadochi, divided his empire, aligning
themselves with his invincible divinity even as they sparred among themselves, jockeying for territory and preeminence.
The term Hellenistic describes Greek art forms, imagery and iconography
as they spread from the banks of the Ganges to the Straits of Gibraltar, from
the Danube to Egypt in a common visual language they called Koine. The
term also names the hybridization that took place as Greek arts came into
contact with indigenous cultures and shifted from divine, austere representation to a kind of baroque, humanistic realism.
Style aside, what immediately springs to mind in the exhibition is how
many of the objects are Roman copies of lost Greek originals borne out
of the Roman mania for all things Greek that created a wide-ranging
market for sculptures and paintings and led to the concept of the
museum. The influence of Greek arts and artistic practice on the
Roman Republic and Empire as it grew and spread furnishes a
good portion of what we know about the Hellenistic world. Copies
which swing us back to the new scale model of Palmyras Arch
of Triumph are often the only insights we have into the works
of the period.
Conquests. Alexanders over Persia, Egypt and points east; the Successors over local kingdoms, city states and one another; Romes, ultimately, over all. Are all the great movements in art the product of
the celebration of? conquests of one sort or another: people over
people, nation over nation, idea over idea?
One of the great capitals of the Hellenistic world, Pergamon (now Bergama, Turkey), the center around which the Met exhibition revolves, rose on
the south slope of a massif under the direction of Philetairos (circa 343263
BCE), a commander in the cohort of Lysimachos one of Alexanders generals. Philetaiross task was to create an all but impregnable citadel for a treasure of war funds, as the shows companion catalog describes it. Philetairos
jumped ship, vowing allegiance instead to Seleucus another of Alexanders
generals, and founder of the powerful Seleucid Dynasty just prior to Seleucuss death. And though he himself was a eunuch, Philetairos left Pergamon
to his nephews, who would found what has become known as the Attalid
Dynasty, named for a number of its kings. Pergamon flourished until
the death of Attalos III in 133 BCE. His will left the city and its
adjacent lands, called Mysia, to the people of Rome.
Excavated almost continuously by German archaeologists and

May 27, 2016 Antiques and The Arts Weekly 11C

Mosaic panel with itinerant musicians, Roman, Late Republican period, SecondFirst Century BCE. Height 187/8
inches by width 181/8 inches. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples

Gallery view. Foreground is a Third Century BCE Greek Hellenistic period bust of a man
wearing a kausia. Bronze with copper and faience or alabaster inlays; height overall 125/8
inches. Archaeological Museum, Kalymnos

others since the 1870s, Pergamon is one of the most studied, best-preserved
Hellenistic capitals. A fascinating 360-degree panorama painting by artist Yadegar Asisi shows a colorful bustling city as it would have appeared in the Second Century CE. In his depiction, as in fact, many of the statues are brightly
painted, in diametric opposition to our notion of classicism, which rests on our
misreading of the austere white columns and busts of antiquity. And it begs a
question worth asking even if we have asked it before: what would the Western world look like if we had known about those vibrant reds and blues and
other colors that coated ancient Greece and Rome?
Three buildings dominated Pergamon.
The Asklepieion, or healing sanctuary, was a center of ancient medicine. The
caduceus of Asklepios, the Greek god of healing, became the symbol of Pergamon and is featured on many coins minted in the city. The snake, renewing
itself by shedding its skin, possessing healing powers in its deadly venom,
seems to speak directly to the cycles of creation and destruction that mark
and mar history and the history of art.
Pergamons Sanctuary of Athena held a library that is thought to have been
exceeded only by the one at Alexandria.
The statue of Athena Parthenos, the single most imposing work in the exhibition, is a copy of the lost Athena, carved in the Fifth Century BCE by
Pheidias, that stood in the Parthenon. Slabs from a large relief that once lined
the walls of the sanctuary depict spoils of Pergamons successful wars against
the Galatians (Gauls) and others. Taken together, these suggest a visual, and
thereby cultural, continuity between Athens and Pergamon, between the past
and present.
Most important of all was the Great Altar, whose structure and sculptural
decoration was meant to evoke the palace of the gods at Olympus. The surviving fragments of the Gigantomachy frieze that surrounded the base of the
altar attest to its status as a wonder of the ancient world. The myth of the
Gigantomachy tells the story of the earth mother, Gaia, who from the blood of
the emasculated Uranos gives birth to the giants a monstrous, aggressive
race imbued with great strength who then attempt to overthrow the reign
of the Olympians and rule the world. An oracle predicts that the gods will be
able to resist the giants only if a mortal can be persuaded to fight on their
side. Not surprisingly, this role falls to the hero Herakles, whose figure in the
Great Frieze (destroyed in antiquity) was next to that of Zeus, one of the
most prominent positions in the entire composition, writes Andreas Scholl.
But the Gigantomachy is not a war between nature and culture, rather,
it is a war between chaos and order. Herakles (Hercules, to us) as the
necessary, human ally of the gods, of order, signals an artistic shift
one that is apparent in the exhibition from the divine to the human,
from gods to individual rulers. Types of people mimes and actors,
the old, the sick begin to appear. Then individual people: wives and
husbands, children. The Hellenistic moves art from idealism to realism,
even in the strange and resplendent Vienna Cameos side-by-side profiles of Ptolemy II (283246 BCE) and his sister-spouse Arsinoe II.
Later, especially in the coins of the period, highly realistic portraits will
become heroic and the rulers will be deified, as Alexander the Great was.
But the notion of individual identity, once out in the open, would never disappear entirely. A stroll through the magnificent Roman bronzes that close
the exhibition proves the point.
One work, a beautiful, humble bronze bust simply titled Male Head Wearing
a Kausia, sums up the exhibition. The kausia is a broad hat of Macedonian
origin found on many coins of the period, most notably on coins from Bactria
(now Afghanistan, where they are still worn to this day). The kausia seems to
appear on numismatic portraits of aging rulers, replacing the military helmet,
as a sign, perhaps, that peace and culture has displaced war, or should. Just
as it is impossible to envision any group like ISIS emerging victorious and
creating a flourishing hybrid culture in the manner of the Hellenistic Age, it is
hard to imagine human beings breaking the cycle of creation and destruction
that seems etched in our genome. In the bronze portrait, this unidentified
but thoroughly individual man, a man who has seen and weathered a great
deal, seems, with his kausia tilted jauntily on his head, open to new ideas and
possibilities. There is no golden haze between the man in the kausia and us.
Antiquity is news. So is hope.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is at 1000 Fifth Avenue. For information,
212-535-7710 or www.metmuseum.org.
Jim Balestrieri is director of the J.N. Bartfield Galleries in New York City.
A playwright and author, he writes frequently about the arts.
Acropolis of Pergamon by Friedrich (von) Thiersch, 1882. Pen
and ink with watercolor on canvas, height 78 inches by width 11
feet 5 inches. Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Sleeping hermaphrodite, Roman,

Imperial period, first half of the
Second Century CE; copy of a
Greek original of the Second Century BCE. Marble from Asia Minor,
height 97/8 by width 58 inches.
Found in Rome during the construction of the Teatro Costanzi,
1879. Museo NazionalePalazzo
Massimo alle Terme, Rome
Coin decorated with a portrait
of Mithridates VI, Eupator Dionysos, Greek, Late Hellenistic period, 8685 BCE. Gold, diameter
11/8 inches. Numismatic Museum,
Athens

The Vienna Cameo, Greek (Ptolemaic),

Early Hellenistic period, 278270/269 BCE.
Ten-layered onyx (Indian sardonyx), gold
hoop; height 4 inches. Antikensammlung,
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna