"From Myth to Life: Images of Women from the Classical World" bridges time and space to show a world of women - and men - not far removed from our own.
By LENNIE BENNETT, Times art critic
Published October 23, 2005
[Images from the Tampa Museum of Art]
Young girl dressed as a bear, Greek, late Classical, mid fourth century B.C., terra cotta.
Cosmetic dish in the shape of Horus, Phoenician, late eighth century B.C., tridacna shell with inlaid garnet and gold.
Aphrodite and Eros, pin, Greek, late Hellenistic, first century B.C., gold.
TAMPA - Are we so different from those who lived thousands of years ago? Evidenced by a gem of a show at the Tampa Museum of Art, no, we are not. Take away a contemporary veneer and you see the impulses coursing through our veins that can become with impunity the same nobility or depravity, frivolity or profundity that is depicted or implied in the 44 objects on view in "From Myth to Life: Images of Women from the Classical World." It also explores, perhaps unintentionally, the many forms love takes, representing 1,500 years of domestic history, from Bronze Age Greece to Imperial Rome.
The theme of the exhibition is the female, real and mythological, in the ancient world. It provides both community narratives and slices from the lives of now anonymous individuals. We see battlefield heroics and intimate encounters (some frankly erotic) painted on vessels. Exquisitely wrought personal items are versions of today's luxury brands minus the designer logos. What we glean from them is no news flash: Women were central to every aspect of life even if they didn't rule the world.
True, they were never soldiers, but no Greek warrior would have spurned the blessing of Athena, goddess of war. On one side of an amphora from about 500 B.C., she rides to battle in a chariot, holding her own reins with assurance, while on the other side a soldier, shield in hand, seems ready to answer her call. On another vessel, an Amazon, member of the renegade group of women warriors, sits astride a horse, ready to spear a male opponent who kneels in supplication. She's magnificently implacable. To balance the scales (and maybe make a case for ultimate male supremacy), an Amazon on the kylix's other side breathes her last as a knife is plunged into her flesh. But her attacker has his arm around her in a curiously tender gesture. Ambivalence about strong women ... sounds familiar.
A tiny terra-cotta statue of a girl dressed as a bear commemorates a ceremony honoring the goddess Artemis, a virgin who was patroness of both childbirth and the hunt (how's that for passive-aggressive?). Bears were associated with her because their cyclical habits of hibernation and fertility were considered similar to women's reproductive cycles and mother bears were especially protective of their cubs. Those associations were known to every Greek in the fourth century B.C., but to us the little girl could simply be playing dress-up (or getting ready for Halloween!), wearing a big mask, knees bent in a joyous dance.
We'll never know, but we can suspect that the exquisite bibelots on view were gifts. A gold pin to fasten the corner of a woman's cloak is a lavishly sculpted depiction of Aphrodite, goddess of love, who is getting ready for some special occasion with the help of her son, Eros. He holds a mirror up for her self-inspection and stands near so she can use him to balance while she pulls on an ankle bracelet. These are immortals, of course, but the moment is touchingly human, and the pin was likely a token from an adoring man to his beloved.
The exhibition's show-stopper is a carved shell from Phoenicia, miraculously intact, that was a boudoir treasure, something precious for a dressing table. Its tip has been fashioned as the head of Horus, an Egyptian god popular with Phoenicians who took the form of a protective hawk, a winged home-security system so to speak.
Sex seemed to be uninhibited fun to the Greeks. A small, round terra-cotta jar is adorned with a risque encounter between two nude couples as a young boy serves them wine. And here's the real kicker: An inscription on the lid reads, "The boy is beautiful, the boy, the boy is beautiful." Whoa!
On a clay fragment, a respectable-looking housewife puts towels in a chest decorated with a nymph and satyr dancing suggestively, a sort of erotic tease behind the closed doors of a home. And love gone wrong is depicted on a krater illustrating the story of Lykourgos murdering his son, then his grief-stricken wife. It's horrific and, according to myth, the fault of Dionysus, god of excess, who was said to have driven Lykourgos mad. (It's always someone else's fault.)
Everything here makes a contemporary connection. The challenge is to connect their past to our present without reading too much of ourselves into these antiquities.
The exhibition is part of a collection belonging to Walter and Celia Gilbert of Massachusetts, and it was first shown at Smith College, her alma mater. Mr. Gilbert's statement in the exhibit catalog reflects their pleasure in these objects, presumably loved very long ago and now newly loved, a reminder that, as Henry James wrote, relationships never die. That's their story and glory.
"From Myth to Life: Images of Women from the Classical World" is at the Tampa Museum of Art, 600 N Ashley Drive, Tampa, through Dec. 31. Also showing: "Georgia O'Keeffe and her Time." Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission: $8 adults, $6 seniors, $3 students and free for children younger than 6. (813) 274-8294.
