NEW YORK: To add context to an exhibition of Hellenistic art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has reproduced a copy of the famous ‘Alexander Mosaic’, which once enlivened the floor of an elite house in Pompeii. It’s a helpful way of inserting Alexander himself into the drama of a stunning show, “Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World”.
Dominating the galleries like he once dominated the world, Alexander is seen on horseback, a cynosure of power and elegance amid the clamour of battle, which he surveys with one eye unnaturally large and wide open. His hair, thick with sweat and dust, flows wildly from the top of his head to the nape of his neck, and he is seen from the side, looking intently forward into the fray.
The downside of using a reproduction in an exhibition of authentic objects is that it can make you suspicious of the real thing. I passed by a genuine, and rare, ‘emblema’ — a highly detailed mosaic made of tiny tiles — and thought at first it was a colour print of a painting. It shows four itinerant musicians playing their instruments, standing in a shallow space and casting shadows on the floor and wall behind them.
Everything is meticulously rendered: the folds of the gowns they wear, the caricature of the masks that cover their faces, even the shadows gathered low to the ground on the wall behind them. If you give this miraculous work just a passing glance, it seems almost photographic, an illusion heightened by the “digital” quality of its delicate tesserae or tiles.
The exhibition is full of small, and sometimes very large, marvels like this one. The Hellenistic bronze exhibition at the National Gallery of Art earlier this year surveyed one type of art from the period between the age of Alexander, and the final domination of Rome over the territories he conquered.
This exhibition draws out from that focus, and includes sculpture in bronze, stone and terracotta, mosaics, glassware, cameos, coins and jewellery. Although some of its most powerful pieces are from the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, which is closed for renovation, the exhibition isn’t exclusively focused on that city, one of the most artistically productive of the several Greek kingdoms that formed after Alexander’s short-lived empire broke apart.