Riace Warriors and priceless artefacts shed light on Greek history

THE continuity and richness of Greek history is on display in two exhibitions, one in Italy and the other in Melbourne.

One of two Riace Warrior bronzes, on display in Reggio di Calabria, Italy.

THERE are a few places in the world — and many of them are in Italy — that are worth visiting for one or two buildings, sculptures or paintings. The most extreme case is perhaps the little Tuscan village of Monterchi, notable only for having a masterpiece by Piero della Francesca, the Madonna del Parto. You get off a bus in the middle of nowhere and walk for­ a half-hour along country roads, but it’s well worth the effort.

The city of Messina, destroyed in the earthquake of 1908, then badly bombed during World War II, is the gateway to Sicily when crossing from the mainland, but otherwise is mainly of interest for a regional museum that holds two late paintings by Caravaggio: the beautiful Adoration of the Shepherds and one of the artist’s greatest works, The Raising of ­Lazarus, in which among other things he ­recalls the Christ of The Calling of St Matthew in Rome.

Across the strait is a city that has even less to recommend it than Messina: Reggio di Calabria, once the Greek Rhegion, ally of Athens during the disastrous Sicilian Expedition, but today a testimony to unplanned and too often unfinished urban development.

Yet Reggio has a single artistic attraction that makes it more than worth the visit: the so-called Riace Warriors.

These two bronze statues were discovered by chance by an amateur diver in 1972 and are now newly exhibited after a long restoration. We are still not sure where they were made or installed, why they were moved or where they were going — although the chances are that they were on their way from Greece or southern Italy to Rome or perhaps from Rome to Constantinople — but it seems that the ship went down in a storm and they lay undisturbed on the seabed for the next 15 to 20 centuries.

The significance of the discovery is hard to exaggerate. Most of the great freestanding statues of the classical period, unlike the Arch­aic kouroi and temple reliefs that continued to be executed in marble, were cast in bronze.

In due course a great many of these were acquired by the Romans and moved to Italy. After the fall of Rome, the barbarians saw in these masterpieces merely a source of a valuable alloy, and almost all were melted down. Today, only a handful of large bronze statues of the classical period survive.

Fortunately, the popularity of these great works ensured that marble copies were made in the Roman period, and in most cases these are what we have to rely on today. Such copies are naturally variable in their skill and sensitivity: some are full of life and feeling, others leaden and inert. But even in the best cases, it is like reading poetry in translation. One gets the general idea and some sense of the imagery and themes, but subtlety of verbal music and the micro-thoughts that arise from the precise choice of words and syntactic order are necessarily lost.

The contrast between these two figures and the Doryphoros in the Archaeological Museum at Naples is telling, especially as the latter represents, if not an advance in any simplistic sense, at least a more mature and complete expression of the classical ideal of the figure. For while in each of the Riace figures the weight is dropped on to one leg, thus achieving the formal unity of a single centre of gravity and a single serpentine line from head to foot, the sculptors who made them hesitated to embrace the consequences of this formal innovation.

In fact, when we drop our weight on to one leg, the pelvic girdle tends to turn away towards the non-weight-bearing leg. But the upper part of the torso tends to turn back, in compensation, to face in the same direction as the weight-bearing leg, thus creating the gentle twist — the offsetting of the axes of pelvic and shoulder girdles — known as contrapposto.

The sculptor or sculptors of the Riace figures, while consciously evoking the powerful serpentine movement through the whole body, were clearly not comfortable with this twisting motion, and they cancelled it by bringing forward the non-weight-bearing leg, thus making the whole torso flat and frontal. This is what gives these works, for all their mastery of anatomy, a subtle but pronounced stiffness, like a vestige of archaic rigidity.

Again, it would be misleading to think of this quality in narrowly progressivist terms because in fact it is fully integrated into the aesthetic expression of the works and seems particularly appropriate to the kind of warlike alertness of the figures, perhaps a commemoration of the battle of Marathon, or in another hypothesis Eteocles and Polynices about to confront each other for the throne of Thebes. It would be easier to explain the similarity of their attitudes if they were intended to face each other.

The more relaxed posture of the Doryphoros would not suit these figures, who are not athletes but warriors: not evocations of the youthful maturity known as hebe, but of the acme of life, close to the ages of 35 to 45. But what is above all striking in the comparison is that while the Doryphoros is a great masterpiece and a reference work in the history of art, we know it only in translation. The Riace figures are original works, incomparably vivid, alive in every astonishing anatomical detail and deeply moving in the calm, powerful features that speak to us with disturbing and enigmatic immediacy of a time 2½ millennia past.

The continuity of Greek history, from remote past to modern times, despite many interruptions and especially centuries of stifling Turkish domination, is the theme of the Benaki Museum in Athens.

Thanks to a generous 10-year loan agreement, a selection of works from the Benaki collection has opened at the Hellenic Museum in Melbourne, an institution that is well-known within the city’s Greek community but perhaps not, until now, to a broader public.

The collection is designed above all to offer samples of art and culture in Greece at different points in a long history that extends back to per­iods much earlier than the arrival of the first Greek-speaking people in the area. Thus there is a crouching steatopygic fertility figure with a phallic head, uniting fertility symbols of both sexes, such as one encounters in Neolithic cultures around the Mediterranean.

This work is from 5800 to 4500BC, while an elegant Cycladic figure of about 2700 to 2300BC belongs to a more sophisticated stage of early civilisation, one contemporary with important developments in Mesopotamia and Egypt. It is still a fertility figure, but here the sexual attributes are much less conspicuous, and it is the deep cut between the legs that functions as a vulval image.

From the Minoans, the pre-Greek Cretans, there is a clay figurine of the goddess, arms extended in her incarnation as Mistress of Beasts; and also a small bronze votive model of a double axe, an object of special cultural significance, no doubt connected to sacrifice, in Minoan culture.

The Mycenaeans, the first Greeks, who were influenced by and then dominated Minoan Crete, are represented by a number of objects, but none more important and at the same time puzzling as a gold kylix with a repousse motif of running hounds. This was a significant and expensive acquisition in 1939 and one to which the museum’s founder, Antonis Benaki, was particularly attached; there is an often-reproduced contemporary photograph of him admiring the cup on display in a glass case.

Unfortunately, there have long been doubts about the cup’s authenticity. This object, which if genuine is extremely rare and valuable, was acquired without provenance from a dealer about whom we know nothing. It also presents a number of problems, including the fact the body and foot are soldered to the stem, which is not the usual procedure for works of this scale at the time.

The arguments for and against the authenticity of the cup have been reviewed in detail by Irini Papageorgiou of the Benaki Museum itself (2008) and it appears that they cannot be decisively settled at this point. In itself, the cup is an attractive object and the motif of the running hounds is an engaging one. But, on a closer inspection, the animals lack the vitality so evident in bulls and human figures in the famous Vaphio cups.

This could be a matter of skill — after all, we can’t expect all craftsmen of any period to be equally able — but the skill of the Vaphio cups is underpinned by an acute and intuitive feel for the experience of animals that is hard to simulate in the modern world.

There are countless other objects of metal and ceramics that could be discussed at length, but the focus is decisively on the work of the craftsman and artefacts of small scale, and this in turn reflects a focus on social history, and on a concern for how modern Greece came about. Those interested in ancient Greece as the fountainhead of modern civilisation tend to ignore what happened to the Greek homeland itself in the Byzantine age and especially under Turkish domination. To a Greek, of course, these more recent periods are of great significance.

All would have to agree, though, that Greek civilisation declined drastically over this time: the home of free speech, philosophy, inimitable literature and dynamic, democratic political life was gradually reduced to a folk culture dominated by the Orthodox Church.

But the Greek spirit was not completely extinguished, and it reappears in the wars of independence that went on throughout much of the 19th century, from the Greek mainland to Crete, and are represented here by weapons, costumes and historical prints.

Gods, Myths & Mortals: Greek Treasures Across the Millennia

Hellenic Museum, Melbourne

Riace Warriors

Archaeological Museum, Reggio di Calabria, Italy