Art Of The Day Weekly
#428 - from 28 April 2016 to 4 May 2016
Fragmentary Colossal Head of a Youth, Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (AvP VII 283) © SMB / Antikensammlung
Return to Pergamon
NEW YORK – Just like in the case of Babylon, located some one hundred kilometres South of Bagdad, it is not easy for our contemporaries to place Pergamon on a map. Yet the city, close to today’s Smyrna in Turkey, embodied for over half a millennium (since the IIIrd century B.C.) the sumptuous Hellenistic civilisation that irradiated over a territory of various million square kilometres. At the beginning of our era, this faithful ally of Rome was visited by a number of Emperors, such as Hadrian and Marc Aurelius. It was a cultural center, had a gigantic library, and when papyrus came to lack due to the embargo by the jealous people of Alexandria, they perfected parchment (the Latin word pergamena derives from Pergamon). The Metropolitan Museum has drawn from the immense collection of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, as well as from other lenders, and has brought together nearly 300 objects to represent what was a Golden age with mosaics, gold work, bronze statues, cameo of which the famous Vienna cameo, and much more.
• Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World at the Metropolitan Museum, from 18 April to 17 July 2016.