Powerful or tamed: nature in Ancient Greece

Madrid,

One of the exhibitions that this year commemorates the tenth anniversary since the reopening and reform of the National Archaeological Museum reviews the many ways in which the ancient Greeks related to nature, the one that surpassed them and the one that they tried to domesticate; the one that posed dangers for them and the one that offered them opportunities for food and prosperity.

Margarita Moreno Conde and Ángeles Castellano would curate “Between chaos and cosmos. Nature in Ancient Greece”, a tour of more than a hundred pieces (ceramics, terracottas, bronzes, coins… and plaster casts of relevant classical works that have been donated by the National Museum of Sculpture of Valladolid and that have been restored for the chance); Most of these compositions belong to the MAN collections, but other relevant lenders are also the Louvre, the museums of ancient art in Munich and Berlin and the Costume Museum. The original compositions are dated between the third millennium and the third century BC and the common thread of the presentation is the essential Greek glass, container of infinite stories: we must remember that the Archaeological Museum has 2,000 ceramics from this culture.

Relying on this material collection and its iconography, but also on classical texts that come to our attention at various points in the exhibition, the center seeks to delve deeper into the links between the Greeks and that natural environment of which, unlike our current perception, , were very conscious of being part, without this diminishing the weight of the symbolism with which they gave it.

Twelve sections articulate this proposal, which begins by referring to the birth of Aphrodite immersed in marine chaos (Cronus castrated her father, Uranus, with a sickle and threw the genitals into the ocean, from where the goddess emerged from the foam) and then , immerse ourselves in the approaches of ancient Greek culture to the origins of the aforementioned Cronus and the Earth: it was understood, curiously, that the genesis of the universe was prior to the emergence of the gods. Fragments of texts by Plato or Hesiod will transport the viewer to a Golden Age in which human beings lived in remarkable harmony with their environment, a land that in turn provided them with all the means for their subsistence (domesticated nature) or whose Domination was a challenge: some red-figure ceramics portray efforts to tame wild beasts or to conquer the then borders of the known world.

There are many references that we will find here to the human epic of conquest of the natural: of certain animals, very present in everyday life and for reasons not only nutritional, since they were part of religious and social rites; and plants, which were taken to the sanctuaries as offerings and used for many different purposes. Some were even overexploited: silphium, which appears on the coins of Cyrene, was attributed medicinal properties and its massive use was the reason for its extinction. The Mediterranean triad (wheat, vine and olive tree) has its own section, which even then provided basic sustenance to a society with an agricultural-based economy; Another of its sources of nutrition was, evidently, the sea, which also favored the progress of the Greek people in another way: that of commercial and cultural exchanges.

Between chaos and cosmos. National Archaeological Museum

Compared to the balance that we rightly always associate with Greek art, it also provided us with some hybrid beings in which human and animal traits were combined, such as mermaids and centaurs, sometimes considered messengers of the gods. Basically, they came to reflect the diffuse distances between human nature and the rest of nature in the ideology of the ancient Mediterranean civilizations, which, however, also wanted to direct some of them towards enjoyment: gardens were conceived to sensory enjoyment, although they were not public, but were located inside the homes of the privileged, or surrounding the sanctuaries. In various images, the capacity for natural regeneration is linked to a god, Eros.

“Between chaos and cosmos” closes with sections dedicated to the afterlife and concoctions and potions; in the first case, because certain animals helped the deceased in their transit, such as the friendly dolphins; in the second, because herbs, ointments and roots, mostly used by women (in myths, by Circe and Medea), were part of the frequent care uses.

Among the most beautiful pieces in the Archaeological Museum we can see a ceramic painted by Nikias with a representation of Heracles at the ends of the world, arrived from the Munich Glyptothek: it is a krater in whose center Atlas supports the sky, surrounded by his wife Hesperis and his daughters, the Hesperides. The hero is found inside a cauldron, the cup of Helios, with which he heads to his eleventh challenge. Also a funerary ascos, polychrome ceramic discovered in Canosa (Italy), in which the image of the deceased emerges from a funerary vessel, vehicle of the soul of the deceased; In the center of the work is the Gorgon mask, which wards off evil.

The Bowdoin painter is the author of another red-figure ceramic work, Lecitus with Eros on dolphinshowing Eros hyperpontios, the one who goes over the seasabout a dolphin, the species that was believed to lead the dead to the Island of the Blessed. The symbol of Aphrodite, linked to both natural fertility and the afterlife, was the dove, like the one we admire under a lush arbor in another piece from southern Italy. A glass also comes from Apulia that narrates the abduction of Thetis by Peleus, while the former was transformed into fire, water, wind, tree, bird, tiger, lion, snake or cuttlefish, before returning to its initial form and being born. of both Achilles.

The Louvre has lent a very fine glass with a navigation scene due to Nicosthenes: it represents two ships with unfurled sails that sail through the sea facing sirens, perhaps in reference to those who sang to Ulysses in the Odyssey; and from the Antikensammlung in Berlin, an amphora has arrived, found in Attica, in which the shaking of the olive by two men is recreated.

Another anniversary coincides, by the way, with this exhibition: the 150th anniversary of the Museum’s acquisition of the rich collection of antiquities of the Marquis of Salamanca, José de Salamanca y Mayol, who owned the largest collections of ancient art in our country in the 19th century. It happened in 1874, just seven years after the founding of the MAN.