Ancient art of Greeks on display
Cleveland exhibit features pieces from colonists in Italy

The Cleveland Museum of Art is showing an art exhibit made by Greek colonists, circa 700 to 500 B.C. through January 5.

When Heinrich Schliemann went in search of ancient Troy, he did so in the belief that the tales of Homer were more than just stories.

In 1870 he began to dig at Hissarlik in Minor Asia. On June 14, 1873, he found what he believed to be King Priam's treasure. Although it was later proved to belong to a different king, Schliemann had demonstrated that the tales of Homer -- the Iliad and the Odyssey -- once thought to be merely oral traditions, did indeed transmit memories of an ancient past, the history of the migration of the Greek civilization throughout the Mediterranean some 3,000 years ago.

One of the most important of these migrations was into southern Italy, where Greeks introduced to the native Etruscans and Romans a new alphabet, city planning, technology and a wealth of myth, religion and literature.

The Greeks called it ``Megale Hellas'' and the Romans ``Magna Graecia'' (greye-kee-a). In either tongue it means Great Greece, and when they said it, they meant it.

Through Jan. 5 the Cleveland Museum of Art is showing Magna Graecia, an exhibit of 81 works of art, circa 700 to 500 B.C., made by ancient Greek colonists in southern Italy and brought to our area for the first time.

The exhibit was organized and supported by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Tampa Museum of Art, where the show will be seen next spring.

Those who put the show together include Michael Bennett, CMA curator of Greek and Roman art and adjunct professor of ancient art at Case Western Reserve University; Aaron J. Paul, the Tampa Museum of Art's Richard E. Perry Curator of Greek and Roman Art; and Mario Iozzo, director of the Center for Conservation in Florence and director of the Archaeological Museum of Chiusi, Italy.

Life was good in Western Greece.

The ancient Greeks founded new cities based on those they left behind, but on a grander scale.

Homer's Odyssey describes the founding of one such Western Greek colony (Chapter 6, verses 7 to 10):

``From that place godlike Nausithoos took up and led [the people] into Scheria, far from men who eat bread, and drove a wall about the city, and built the houses, and made the temples of the gods, and apportioned the farmland.''

Notes Bennett: ``The poetic account of Scheria's settlement by Nausithoos has the ring of historical truth.'' The oikist, or founder, Nausithoos, moved his people to Scheria, set up the city's important religious and socioeconomic institutions, and gave each settler land.

``These elements of the Greek way of life would be replicated and disseminated throughout Magna Graecia and Sicily with the spread of the Greek colonies: a walled city, a public meeting place, temples for the gods, a home and a tract of land, good food, dancing, drinking, and the enjoyment of epic poetry.''

Ancient authors and modern archaeologists agree -- the first Western Greeks settled Pithekoussai on Ischia, the small island just off the Bay of Naples sometime in the first half of the eighth century B.C. Subsequent cities were founded by Greeks from various regions.

Their treasures are now housed in archaeological museums, from whom exhibition organizers have borrowed extensively.

Most of these works have never before left Italy, and their importance can hardly be understated.

Greek culture had a huge impact on the Etruscans and the Romans, who later spread these values throughout the Roman Empire, under whose influence the defining character of Western civilization was established.

Visitors to the exhibition will see the treasures from these museums arranged as though seen on a site tour, while traveling from one ancient settlement to another.

For students of ancient art, seeing these objects is a mind-altering experience.

Traditionally presented to American art students in textbooks or slides, seeing the object itself presents us with a unique and irreplaceable experience: texture, scale, a sense of how and why they were made, and most importantly, context.

One of the more telling comments made on the audio tour of this show is that Southern Italy had a dearth of marble, so plentiful in Greece and the Peloponnesus. This explains the small number of marble objects in the show and the quantity of works made in sandstone and terra cotta.

It explains the sometimes rough character of the works or their broader outlines.

And it helps us to understand the blending of the Greek, Etruscan and Roman cultures into what would become Rome.

Among the masterpieces on display are a fearsome Gorgon head that formed the end of a temple roof tile, put there to ward off evil.

Serving a similar function is a magnificent restored Gorgon Tablet. The remains of brightly colored paint and her menacing grimace hint at her fearsomeness.

Through her head and torso, the viewer gets the full effect of her frightening aspect, yet her legs are in profile in what is called a pinwheel pose, indicating that she runs faster than any mortal, aided by her winged boots and the wings on her back.

Her toothy grin is augmented by fangs and her tongue sticks out. Her wide eyes ogle the viewer, but lest we forget that she was once a beautiful woman, we see a dab of red paint on her right earlobe and she wears earrings.

Under her right arm she carries her child, the winged horse Pegasus, and under her left would have been her other child, Chrysaor.

She was pregnant with the two by the god of the sea, Poseidon, when Perseus lopped off her head and they sprang from her body. Here, she holds her children, yet she is very much alive.

The three, mother and her two children, appear all over the Greek world on architecture in the form of pedimental sculpture as well as painted tablets, such as this one which may have once adorned a temple in Syracuse.

A lively terra cotta Painted Figurine (c. 250-200 B.C.) comes from a child's tomb -- one of a series of small, lively female figures found there -- and probably served a protective function. Its playful quality stands in contrast to the unfortunate situation for which it was created. She wears a blue himation draped over her right shoulder and over her left arm. Her brown hair is gathered in a bun at her neck and ivy is woven through her hair. Her pose suggests that she is dancing, and she lifts a bunch of grapes in her right hand.

As always the CMA has spared no effort to bring Cleveland-area audiences a full experience with this historical show.

Staff lectures, gallery talks, workshops are all in evidence, along with a Greek Celebration Day on Nov. 10 from 1 to 4:30 p.m.

Tickets for the show are $7; $6 for seniors. Discounts are available for students and groups of 15 or more. Audio tours are $5. Timed tickets are purchased by calling 1-888-262-0033 or online at www.clevelandart.org. Call 216-421-7340.

By Dorothy Shinn
Beacon Journal art and architecture critic

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