The Poseisoden Statue at the Tampa Bay Art Museum
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Drove
OLD SPORKY: A 200-pound bronze trident may have been held past a giant Poseidon statue.
Poseidon and the Bounding main: Myth, Cult and Daily Life
Runs through Nov. xxx at the Tampa Museum of Fine art, 120 W Gasparilla Plaza, Tampa , 813-274-8130,
tampamuseum.org
When Seth Pevnick, the Tampa Museum of Art's Richard E. Perry Curator of Greek and Roman Fine art — and, as of July, its interim managing director — was interviewing for his job in 2009, he made a memorable pitch. Citing the museum's buying of a nearly 2,000-year-quondam marble statue that he knew only from a TMA catalogue, he proposed to organize a testify nearly Poseidon, the powerful Greek sea god routinely invoked by dwellers of the ancient Mediterranean in matters from safe seafaring to the consumption of bounteous seafood. The fact that the statue — the all-time-conserved big-scale likeness of Poseidon held in a U.S. collection — had plant its way to the coastal urban center of Tampa seemed like serendipity.
5 years afterward, the exhibition Poseidon and the Sea: Myth, Cult and Daily Life has emerged, with a certain irony, merely as Pevnick'due south professional rhythms take been somewhat ruffled by the necessity of taking over the reins at TMA (temporarily) following the deviation of former executive manager Todd Smith for the Orangish County Museum of Art. For luck, he might do well to pour out a libation to Poseidon, who was known equally a tamer of horses also as a calmer of seas and a savior of ships, according to the poet Homer.
Through a selection of 130 objects culled from 30 lenders, a mere 25 of which vest to TMA, Pevnick constructs a portrait of Poseidon (or Neptune, every bit he was known to aboriginal Romans) equally a personality who infused aboriginal civilisation, symbolism and customs. Along with Zeus and Apollo, Poseidon was one of the Olympian gods in whose honor Panhellenic athletic contests were held each year. And with Zeus and Hades, his immortal brothers, he was understood to concur sway over one-third — the watery tertiary — of the world, making him a force of nature in the lives of many ancient Greeks and Romans. (For their parts, Zeus and Hades controlled the heavens and the underworld.)
"It'south difficult to overstate his importance," Pevnick explained during a walk-through of the exhibition in September. "If you were a sailor or a fisherman, obviously he was your guy."
Works in the portion of the exhibition devoted to the myth of Poseidon lay the narrative background for his fascination. Appearing equally a red-figure analogy on the sides of an ancient Greek vase, in that location's Poseidon the amorous pursuer — depicted, equally usual, with his harpoon-like trident, extended with Freudian vigor in this instance — of a woman likely to be Aithra, whom he impregnated to generate his son Theseus, the hero who would kill the Minotaur. Other offspring appear in similar vignettes: the winged horse Pegasus, born from the coupling of Poseidon and snake-haired Medusa; the merman Triton; and Bellerophon, who killed the Bubble in Homeric myth.
Keen deeds, too, are called out, such equally Poseidon'south overthrow of the giant Polybotes, whom he allegedly pinned under a fragment of an island to subdue. A handful of vases testify slight variations of the story, in which Poseidon is seen clutching his trident in ane mitt with a deject-shaped mass of globe perched on his shoulder, dispatching Polybotes with a superhero'due south gesture.
The centerpiece of the exhibition's "cult" section, devoted to objects associated with the actual worship of Poseidon, is a slender, nearly 14-foot-long solid bronze trident that weighs 200 pounds, on loan from the Getty. As impressive as the object itself, which is topped with a flattened, abstracted fork vaguely reminiscent of a modern-mean solar day spork, is the unsaid existence of its original possessor — most likely a twice life-sized statue of Poseidon. An essay in the exhibition catalogue guides readers through the restrained detective work of antiquities scholarship: The trident, experts surmised, was too heavy for use as an actual weapon and almost stable when held vertically, therefore was likely to have been an accessory to a standing sculpture at to the lowest degree every bit old as 400 B.C. The theory invites you to imagine the otherworldly sensation of gazing up in awe at a giant Poseidon.
The show'southward near delicious pleasures stem from an area devoted to the relevance of sea civilization to daily life in ancient Greece, Rome and Etruria (central Italian republic). Poseidon the grapheme is somewhat abandoned in favor of plates and vessels adorned with lively maritime iconography, east.m. a galley of vigorously rowing sailors juxtaposed with a striped perch and a floating cuttlefish; ceramic model ships; miniature bottles (by and large Greek) shaped like cockleshells, a fish and, virtually charmingly, a lobster claw; and transparent diddled glass flasks (Roman) in the shape of spiny fish.
The wit of such objects, which sometimes go to virtuosic lengths to create visual puns or evoke the living earth on their still surfaces, is exemplified by a 6th Century B.C. Greek dinos, or wine basin, borrowed from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Its round, onyx-black body is topped with a terracotta-colored rim painted with tiny black figures in battle — amongst them Theseus against the Minotaur. On the inside of the rim, a quartet of sailing ships would announced to float on wine when the vessel was filled, evoking Homer's and so well-known poetic clarification, the "vino-nighttime sea." Every bit an accessory to an evening of convivial drink, conversation and storytelling, information technology would have provided an entertaining reminder of the deep significance of the bounding main to human experience, an idea that rings true today.
Source: https://www.cltampa.com/arts/poseidon-adventures-at-tampa-museum-of-art-12269687
0 Response to "The Poseisoden Statue at the Tampa Bay Art Museum"
Post a Comment