Category Archives: Ancient world

The Trouble with Snake Goddesses

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Over 100 years after the excavations at Knossos, Crete, it is hard for the modern observer to appreciate the excitement engendered by Evans’s finds. Here was a whole new civilization with artistic achievements rivalling Egypt’s. Evans himself fostered expectation by dwelling on the modernity of the style and by embarking on a (now) controversial restoration programme which owed much to his own romanticized image of the ‘Minoan’ (his own word) past. As Minoan artefacts became prestige objects for museums, unscrupulous dealers, smugglers and restorers were quick to react. Top of the wish list was the snake goddess.

With her full exposed bosom, pinched waist, flounced skirt and modern expression, she looked exactly what was expected: an art even superior to that of Classical Greece and comparable to the Italian Renaissance. But Getty curator Kenneth Lapatin has suggested that the famous snake goddess might not be a genuine antiquity.

It is certainly true that from modest beginnings in Crete in 1903, the production of modern Minoica moved onto a world-wide market. In 1914 the Boston Museum of Fine Arts paid a staggering $950 for a very damaged chryselephantine snake goddess with no detailed provenance. It has affinities with the faïences from the Temple Repositories but also a number of crucial unexplained differences, not least that it is the only example in Minoan art in which ivory is used for a female figure. Questions about its authenticity remain unanswered. In the 1920s the curator at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, wishing to enhance the status of her department, fell for a marble snake goddess, once again with no provenance except for a vague ‘east of Knossos’. £2750 were duly paid to a local intermediary who said he had it through a Paris dealer. Doubts raised in Crete were set aside and ascribed to jealousy and embarrassment at having allowed such a unique artefact to leave the island. Yet questions soon began to be asked. No archaeologist had actually seen the object come out of the ground. Authentication was based purely on style, subjective judgement and expectations. Evans was still defending it in 1935 but the Fitzwilliam Museum, after demoting its status to ‘dubious’ in 1964, last showed it in 1991.

Who dunnit? Evidence points in two directions: first the Gilliérons, father and son, who worked as restorers for Evans from the very beginning and eventually set up shop in Athens producing fine detailed replicas of Knossos finds for academic collections. Alternatively it was one of the Cretan workers trained by them. Sir Leonard Woolley in his memoirs tells how a forger, confessing on his deathbed, had wept bitter tears on discovering how much money his work could ultimately command.

Extract from Blue Guide Crete by Paola Pugsley. Knossos is also one of the sites featured in Sites of Antiquity: 50 Sites that Explain the Classical World.

For more on the Gilliérons and the artworks of Knossos, see here , for details of an exhibition currently running at the Met Museum in New York.

The Roman Villa at Balácapuszta (Baláca, Nemesvámos, Hungary)

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In the Roman province of Pannonia, most veterans who received donations of land settled down to a life of animal husbandry and crop-growing, living well, perhaps, but modestly. There was at least one villa, however, in the centre of a 20-acre estate, that had pretensions. It lay close to the main road to Aquincum, which branched off the Amber road between Aquileia and the Baltic. It flourished in the third century AD and its owners were obviously familiar with grand villas in Italy, for they chose to imitate them in the style of opulent floor mosaics and in the wall paintings. The Pannonian climate was harsh and the peristyle garden was walled in, with engaged rather than free-standing columns (top picture), but still the decoration, with its trompe l’oeil fence, with painted trees and flowers behind, sought to give the impression of a real garden and brings to mind the fine decoration of the Villa of Livia near Rome. Sculpture was crude (see the head of Hercules, middle picture) with his tight curls looking like a tortoiseshell helmet) but the mosaic work was superb, as the floor of this apsidal hall attests (bottom picture). The family buried its members (including a horse and a dog) in a grand mausoleum on top of a nearby hill. By the fourth century, all was over. The villa began to fall into ruin.

Attila the Hun and the Foundation of Venice

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The Hungarian pavilion in the grounds of the Biennale by the Giardini Pubblici was built in 1909. Its exterior is decorated with mosaics by one of Hungary’s foremost exponents of the Secession, Aladár Kőrösfői Kriesch. They depict Attila the Hun. The one shown here has gold lettering underneath it, reading (in Hungarian): ‘The siege of Aquileia’. Attila attacked the city in AD 452. In Roman times it had been a flourishing trading post. In the early centuries of Christianity it was the seat of a patriarch. The siege was long and the city was well defended. Attila’s men began to be discouraged, and called for hostilities to be abandoned. But then Attila noticed a strange thing–at least, according to legend he did. Flocks of storks were abandoning the city, flying with their young into the countryside. He interpreted this as a sign that Aquileia was a doomed city and redoubled his efforts at conquest. The result was a pitiless sack. The survivors fled across the water to the lonely shoals of an uninhabited lagoon. The settlement they created here would one day become one of the greatest maritime republics the world has ever known. Venice.

Roman Aquileia

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The ruins of the Roman colony of Aquileia, once the fourth largest Roman city in Italy, lie under and around the peaceful modern town and its splendid Early Christian basilica church. Where the amphitheatre once stood, citizens now hoe their vegetable patches and tend their sweet peas. It is all incredibly atmospheric. The town also boasts one of the finest archaeological museums in the country, full of exceptionally interesting artefacts, not least some exquisite pieces made of the Baltic amber for which Aquileia was once a key trading centre. It is easy to spend a full day and more here. The tree-lined walk along the quayside of the old Roman river port is not to be missed. Nor is the Sepolcreto, a quiet enclosure containing five family tombs of the 1st–2nd centuries. After seeing the museum, stop off for a glass of local Malvasia wine in the Attila Scourge of God (Attila Flagellum Dei) wine bar on the opposite side of the street. If you need somewhere to say, the simple, no-frills, friendly Aquila Nera is recommended. It is extremely good value and they offer a good dinner.

Detail of the tomb stele of a blacksmith
IN AGR P XXX: a grave enclosure measuring 30 feet in depth, with foot, exactly one Roman foot long

The Roman Forum

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‘Archaeology often brings to light relics—mysterious foundations, tumbled blocks, a charred sacrificial pit, the decaying stumps of dead houses—fascinating to the scholar but a stunning bore to the simple visitor.’ So wrote Dilys Powell in The Villa Ariadne. Archaeologists can be monomaniacs and their interests are often distressingly narrow. So it was with some anticipation that I took up David Watkin’s The Roman Forum, whose contentions are very clear: ‘Archaeologists have eliminated much evidence of the fascinating post-antique life of the Forum,’ and their labours have made ‘visiting parts of the Forum about as attractive as looking into the hole made in New York on 9/11.’ Ouch! These accusations run like leitmotifs throughout the book, together with the curious conspiracy theory that guidebooks are complicit; that there are things they ‘do not want us to see’.

By David Watkin (Profile Books, hardback 2009; paperback June 2011)

If one works night and day to produce guidebooks, it is difficult not to get on the defensive. The Portico of the Dii Consentes doesn’t ‘turn out’ to be a modern reconstruction. Pay attention to your Blue Guide! It clearly says that it dates from 1858. There is no plot to keep visitors in the dark about the churches of San Lorenzo in Miranda or Santi Luca e Martina. They are just never, ever open. But for Watkin, everything was better in the time of Piranesi. Piranesi, he tells us, with the authority of one who knew him in a former life, recorded the Forum ‘at the last time when it was still a place of poetry, capable of inspiring great painters, writers and thinkers.’ Glum stuff, but the threnody does begin to strike a chord and the aimiable style in which the bad news is delivered soon reels you in. Watkin laments the fact that the Forum has been turned inside out: its surviving churches open away from it, no longer into it; it has been severed from the life of the city and turned into a visitors’ theme park. Up until a very few years ago, entry was free and one could use the Forum as a thoroughfare; Romans going about their daily business could loiter and linger in it. Now you have to queue to be admitted through a turnstile, custodians are bossy and offhand, and no one who is not a tourist (or an archaeologist) ever goes there. The magnificent ‘challenge of the relationship between ancient and modern’ has been obscured.

Despite the underlying crotchetiness, the book is immensely enjoyable. Watkin’s love for the Forum, his breadth of knowledge, and his wistfulness about what might have been (in a Peter Pan world) are ingenuous, impressive and infectious—a beguiling combination. The chapter on the despoliation of the Forum’s monuments in the service of the new St Peter’s is a superb read. No visitor should ever again imagine that the mere march of time had anything to do with it. What Watkin cannot admit, though, is that if archaeologists hadn’t got their hands on the Forum when they did (in the late 19th century), the urban planners certainly would have. And the challenging relationship between ancient and modern would now be as desperate a tussle there as it is at Largo Argentina.

Nevertheless, if you’re travelling to Rome—either for the first or the fiftieth time—I recommend that you get this book. Not only will it add whole layers of meaning to your visit, but it will also force to you answer the following testing questions: if archaeologists are to be banished, who will take their place (and who will pay for it)? What is the point of a desert like the Forum in the centre of a busy and increasingly cramped-feeling capital city? And whose opinion was nearer to the mark: Palladio’s, for whom the Forum offered ‘not the spectacle of ancient glory but rather the possibility of recreating it’; or Pevsner’s, for whom the Forum belongs ‘to the civilisation of Antiquity, not to what we usually mean when we speak of European civilisation’? Watkin loves the Baroque churches that were built over the ancient ruins in the 17th century. But did their architects believe they were ‘recreating’, or did they believe they were moving forward into a ‘modern’ era?

Reviewed by Annabel Barber

Blue Guide Rome (10th edition) has extensive coverage of the Forum, with a map of the site and detailed notes on all its monuments, past, present and conjectural.