Museum Pieces

The archeological museum in Lesvos:

In the old building there are two statuettes of a tumbler doing handsprings. The statuettes are placed in profile, right next to each other, so that the effect is like that of Muybridge's horses, or like two frames from a film. It was moving to think of the lightness, the grace, the liveliness of the gesture, and the extreme age of the statuettes.

I liked the carefree presentation of myth as history in this bit of wall text, in the entrance of the old building:

Lesbos, also known in antiquity as Makaria, Pelasgia, Issa, Imerte, Lasia, Aigeira, Aithiope, and Mytonis, was named after the Thessalian hero Lesbos, who came to the island and married Methymna.
When the Pelasgians, the island's first settlers, came to its shores, they found it deserted, and Xanthos Triopou, their king, named it Pelasgia.
A local tradition in western Asia Minor relates how the Pelasgians came to inhabit the whole of the Ionian coast, north of Mykale, and the nearby islands. More widespread is the view associating or identifying the Pelasgians with the Aeolians.
It is said that seven generations after the coming of the Pelasgians, Lesbos became a wasteland, due to Deukalion's flood. After this came the island's mythical king, Makar or Makareus. Makar was one of the Heliades — son of Helios and Rhodos — and came to Lesbos from Rhodes. Makareus was the son of Krinakos and grandson of Zeus a wise legislator. He came to Lesbos from Holenos in Achaea and subsequently colonized Chios, Samos, Rhodes and Kos. The daughters of this mythical king, Mytilene, Methymna, Antissa, Arisbe, Issa, Agamedes or Pyrra, and his son Eresos, gave their names to the island's cities.
In Homer's Iliad Lesbos is mentioned as the kingdom of Makaras and its name is used to define the geographical extent of Priam's realm. In the Odyssey Nestor tells Telemachos that it was on Lesbos that he, Diomedes, and Menelaos prayed to Zeus to show them the sure way home. A Lesbian variation of this episode of the returning warriors, involving only the two Atreides (Agamemnon and Menelaos), links the most important popular cult on the island with the dynasty of the Atreides, from whom the leading lineages of the Lesbian cities traced their ancestry.
Lesbos is the setting for Homer's struggle between Odysseus and Philomeleides "out of discord," though the poet is particularly vague on how Odysseus came to the island and the identity of his adversary.
One of the secondary campaigns mounted by the Achaeans in the Troad was the destruction of Lesbos. Homer speaks of the taking captive of seven Lesbian women and romantic adaptations of the myth include the tale of the love between Peisidike, daughter of the king of Methymna, and Achilles, and the betrayal of her fatherland.
The myth of the "retribution" of the god Dionysos is also associated with Lesbos. Through his intervention, equity triumphed over the violence and injustice caused by the sacrilege of Makareas, his priest on Mytilene.
Makareas, wishing to misappropriate the gold entrusted for safekeeping in the temple of Dionysos, slew the stranger who had left it. He and his innocent relatives paid for his impious sin with their lives.
On the contrary, Phaonas, an aged ferryman who carried passengers between the city's harbours, was rewarded by Aphrodite for his kindness and humanity. The goddess, disguised as an old woman, asked him to row her in his boat. This Phaonas willingly did and asked no payment, for which she transformed him into a handsome young man.
Myth also links the island music and poetry, Lesbos, with Orpheus. After he was rent apart by the Thracian maenads, his head and lyre were washed up by the sea on its shore, and continued to recite poems, to sing, and to make prophecies. His oracle was near the Bakcheion at Antissa and his lyre hung in the temple of Apollo at Mytilene for many years.
A bronze lion that roamed Lesbos and guarded the island was the work of the god Hephaestus.

In the new building there was a room of heads. One was a clay head of an old man with deep-set prominent eyes; his nose and mouth — the earthlier features — had been rubbed smooth by time. The blankness of the lower half of his face combined with the fierce expressiveness of his eyes gave the whole a haunted, haunting look — as if the eyes had survived two millenia intact by sheer force of will.

There was also a room full of bas-reliefs from graves, all depicting the same thing: the newly deceased on a horse walking towards a tree, presumably at the entrance to the Underworld. In the tree is a serpent, sometimes reaching out to the rider, and, if I'm not mixing the bas-reliefs up with another story, fruits are hanging in the tree. To see this over and over again in glistening white marble, as one walked around the room, was like hearing a line of music that repeats and repeats, and can get no further, full of the contrast between the sad inexorability of the horse's trot and the seductiveness of the serpent, and the mysterious promise of the fruit, the opposite of death. I wanted to ask Eleni what it all meant.

Also in the new building is a large mosaic floor telling the story of Danae and her son Perseus, who were thrown into the sea in a wooden chest by Danae's father Acrisius, and washed ashore unscathed. Eleni helped dig this up.


Neues Grünes Gewölbe, part of the Staatliche Kunstsammlung in Dresden

On display is a part of the royal treasures of the Saxon kings. Some objects are just rich — a huge green diamond — but most are both rich and exquisitely elaborate; one object combines an ordinary material with extreme elaboration: one hundred faces carved on a cherry pit.
The only descendant of this kind of craftsmanship we have is kitsch, so it was illuminating to see precious knickknacks from a time when such things were an admired art form.

Among the most remarkable pieces: a large galleon, with billowing sails, carved entirely out of ivory; the Court of the Grand Mogul, which reminded me of the Met's set for Turandot; Daphne, her sprouting hands and hair made out of coral; concentric ivory spheres on an impossibly thin pedestal; an ostrich whose body is — an ostrich egg! The ostrich's face has that foolishly indignant look typical of its species.

The ivory objects were so exquisite they made me realize that when Jane Austen describes her writing as "the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour," she was not being as modest as I'd thought.

There was a room full of little figures of hunchbacks, cripples, beggars, carved in ivory or assembled from mother of pearl and the most precious materials. Even the museum wall text remarked on the strange juxtaposition of wretchedness and treasure. Oddly, though, the little figures evinced compassion rather than cruelty.


Neues Grünes Gewölbe