TROY: MYTH AND REALITY at the British Museum

Heralds take Briseis from Achilles. Roman relief, 30 BC - AD 80,
reworked 1750-1850. Marble. British Museum.

Anticipating a visit to the British Museum, images from two ends of the museum-experience spectrum warred in my brain. Which would it be? In one scenario, I stood in the hush of grand, gray halls, reverentially studying classical antiquities, exquisitely wrought works in marble, clay, and gold. Vying with that was the realistic image of the unbounded central chamber, once the British Museum Library and now at its feet a town market miscellany—the vast gift shop surrounded by caterers serving bouncy school children and distracted tourists, all dripping and disheveled on a damp November morning.

George Chapman, The Whole Works of
Homer, ca. 1616. Lent by Her Majesty
The Queen.

I got the plebs and patricians both at Troy: Myth and Reality, the major show that opened on 21 November, when I visited, and runs through 8 March 2020. Topic and curation appeal both to a popular audience and to the learned and connoisseurs alike. As an introduction to the stirring story of the Trojan War story and its characters as advanced by the Homeric tradition, it is terrific. The groups of girls in school uniforms with their notebooks in hand appeared quite as engaged by the displays and exemplary labels as did tweedy elders bent low to inspect Chapman's Homer or the inscription painted on a two-handled Greek cup.

I fall somewhere in between these groups, between gawping enthusiasm and a reasonable degree of learning. My literary self felt swoony as I dropped my own eyes upon George Chapman's seventeenth-century English translation of the poetry that moved Keats to feel, "like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into view." The whole exhibition gives one that frisson of discovery and drama, especially in the first half that's focused on ancient art. 

Homer as a god. Hellenistic relief, probably made
in Alexandria by Archelos of Priene, ca. 225-205
BC. Marble, Bovilae, Italy. British Museum.

This show demonstrates how accounts of the Trojan War have been reflected in visual art through the ages, with an intermission focused on the archaeological search for evidence of historical Troy. The curators take care to tell us that the stories are not only from Homer's Illiad, but from many sources lost to us. In the works themselves we see interpretations of familiar episodes that depart from our knowledge of Homeric versions. Still, as illustrated by this Italian relief (right), Homer's stories reigned. Herein, nine Muses and the ranks of the gods above him oversee the apotheosis of the poet, crowned by Time.

Over two centuries earlier than this relief, an Etruscan painter depicted the Judgment of Paris that precipitated the war. Invited to choose which of three goddesses was most beautiful, by selecting Aphrodite over Hera and Athena, he was guaranteed the hand of Helen, who was incidentally already wedded to Menelaus: Ten years of war ensued. This scene shows Aphrodite giving a broad hint by displaying a little leg to Paris (middle panel), while behind her, at the far end of the panel, Helen is gird her for travels by her servants.

Helen promised to Paris. Etruscan wall painting, ca. 560-550 B.C.
Terracotta. British Museum. (poorly photographed by the author through  the vitrine)

Such major episodes from the Iliad and Odyssey abound in this show, and it's impossible to come away without a vivid sense of action and characters. The wrath of Achilles over and over, and is illustrated in a variety of media. One of the most effective of these is a bronze container with etched drawings that show blood-thirsty Achilles cutting the throat of the first of nine Trojan prisoners lined up for sacrifice to his unholy revenge for Patroclus's death. The episode is literally graphic, chilling in its precisely cut detail.

Achilles sacrifices Trojan prisoners (detail).
Container (cista) 320-250 BC. Bronze. Palestrina,
Italy. British Museum

Wounded Achilles, 1825, Filippo Albanicini.
Marble with restored gilded wooden arrow.
The Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth

The stories from the Iliad are stories of high passions against the flames of war. Kings and warriors lose and win wives and slaves in battles waged against stated enemies and, just as often, within their own ranks. Factions fight; the gods intervene or don't, confusing agency. Perspectives on outsized events can make them heroic, tragic, or painfully mixed. Characters too are terribly complex: Achilles is a hero; a defiant brute; a figure of pathos, lost in grief. The curators have taken pains to build a show that highlights the ambiguities and nuance of the stories in the traditions that we know as Iliad and Odyssey—and Aeneid, when we see Homer's stories retold and changed for different literary, cultural, and historical ends. There is no Penelope faithfully awaiting Odysseus, but Creusa who perishes in Troy, leaving Aeneas to take his son and father to found a future dynasty in Italy: Hail Augustus!

"Helen (Flamma Troiae)," ca. 1860. William
Morris. Pencil and watercolor. Victoria and
Albert Museum.

Both Greek Odysseus and Roman Aeneas are strong, courageous, wily, and virtuous. And both draw for audiences the limits of the civilized world in their encounters with the travails and temptations of Beyond: the seductive Sirens, the brutish Cyclops, cannibals, Aeolian winds, and other terrors and intrigues. These heroes ultimately define the power of home and civilization. But Moderns interpret these stories in ways the ancients would not have, as metaphors for all sorts of journeys, especially personal, psychological ones.

Sirens. Roman fresco, painted plaster, AD 20-70. Pompeii, Italy. British Museum.

The second half of the show feels uneven after the first, which is filled exclusively with ancient art. Once we reach the Common Era, when ideas and interpretations that arise from a wider world appear, it strikes me that this bumpy experience is inevitable. The ancient world was tiny. In the art presented, we sense the individuality of regions and periods, but even more we see what is mirrored and reflected in a world that extended only along the shores of the Mediterranean in art produced over 600 years (roughly 500 BC through 100 AD). Over 600 years in the Common Era, though, from around 1400 to 2010, we see work on display from all over Europe—south and north—Britain,  and America. Some of it imitates or refers directly both to the Homeric stories and to ancient art itself, but much refers to the ancient stories in expressions unique to the artists' own times and places. What may feel miscellaneous in a hallway displaying 600 years of work—including illuminated manuscripts, a Rubens painting, William Blake watercolor, and poster for the 2004 movie, Troy, with Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, and Orlando Bloom—is indeed the vast history of Western art and popular culture. It's in the nature of the little we've recovered of ancient art that what remains is relatively unified in place, culture, and study. But the six centuries since then fill the globe and scores of academic departments—history, art, language, anthropology. While I paint this idea with a broad brush, I think it accounts for the sense that the first part of this show is excellent, while the second part is ungainly.

"The Sirens' Song," Romare Bearden, 1977. Collage. Collection of Alan and Pat Davidson.

I'm sorry that I won't have a chance to visit Troy a second—and a third—time. This is a show for several visits, if only to feast the eyes on the riches selected for display. Fortunately, I was able to buy the comprehensive catalogue. It doesn't have the Brad Pitt poster, but most everything else, and a thorough text that goes more deeply than the labels for visitors can. The show runs at the British Museum through 8 March 2020.

More early reviews of Troy: Myth and Reality at the British Museum:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/nov/24/troy-myth-and-reality-review-british-museum-london

https://www.artdependence.com/articles/troy-myth-and-reality/

https://www.timeout.com/london/museums/troy-myth-and-reality-review

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/11/what-really-happened-at-troy/

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-50492708

The photographs are the author's, shot with a cell phone camera through the vitrines and display cases at the show. These images are poor representations of magnificent works of art, but may give the reader a sense of what s/he might gain by seeing the show.