What is Thrace?
Or, better, where is Thrace?
Of all the ancient cultures clustered around the eastern half of the Mediterranean Sea, whether Egypt, Greece, Persia or Rome’s imperial outreaches, Thrace is surely the least well-known. In recent memory, mostly it pops up from “Spartacus,” the 1960 Stanley Kubrick Hollywood epic, and its later television offspring. But the sizable Balkan territory once encompassed much of modern Bulgaria and parts of northern Greece and European Turkey, between the Black Sea and the Aegean.
“Spartacus” screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, blacklisted during the Red Scare, may have identified with the shrewd Thracian gladiator who led a slave revolt against the crushing overlords of the Roman Republic. Unsurprisingly, some of that movie’s blunt-force muscularity turns up in “Ancient Thrace and the Classical World: Treasures From Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece,” a survey of vessels, warrior paraphernalia (armor, weapons, horse trappings), jewelry, tomb sculptures and other objects at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades.
Understandably, the Villa is temporarily closed. The horrendous Pacific Palisades fire annihilated huge swaths of the surrounding community and burned some of the Getty Villa’s grounds. Thankfully, the museum and interior formal gardens were largely untouched. The day was saved by advance planning for wildfire mitigation and courageous staff, including security guards and groundskeepers who risked life and limb and remained at the site to fight the deadly blaze. No reopening date has been announced, as parts of Pacific Coast Highway are closed. (The Getty Center in Brentwood has reopened.) The Thracian show floats in a state of suspended animation.
I managed to see it shortly before the fire. Here’s what I found.
“Ancient Thrace and the Classical World” is significantly characterized by brutality. The archaic society was known for the prowess of its soldiers and its brawny militarism. To generalize, we might describe Thracian art as embodying a barbaric style — not as a term of derision but merely descriptive of a blunt, skillful fierceness so often encountered in its forms.
Among the more startling objects on view is a late 4th century BC bronze helmet that takes the unmistakable form of the conical glans of a human penis. Adorning the spot where the urethral opening would be is a small, finely crafted silver relief bust of Athena, goddess of wisdom and warfare, protector of Aegean city-states, aide and ally of Herakles, Odysseus and other mythic heroes.
Such a helmet, worn to protect the head during battle, stands as an unmistakable sign of aggressive power. Imagine a helmeted phalanx of Thracian soldiers advancing on an enemy. Could there be a more emphatic conflation of symbolic maleness and brute force?
Swords, scabbards, armor — weaponry and objects related to combat are plentiful in the show. Some of the most exquisitely crafted pieces are small decorative elements made for the harnesses of soldiers’ horses — the powerful and celebrated Thessalian breed, perhaps. Think animal jewelry — bridles, straps and other harness parts adorned with eagle heads, rosettes, griffins, busts of Herakles, serpents and lions, often shaped from gold. These small dazzlers glint in the light to both impress and intimidate.
Many (if not most) works in the exhibition have been retrieved from tombs and burial mounds, where even horses could be interred — an indication of their essential value to a warrior class. On occasion, a deceased warrior’s wife would be killed during a funerary ceremony. Necklaces, earrings, bracelets and domestic objects, including painted clay pots and sumptuous gold and silver banquet vessels, would be buried along with them.
One stunning piece, excavated 60 years ago from a tomb in the foothills of mountainous northwest Bulgaria, about 70 miles from Sofia, is the left shin and knee guard from a soldier’s armor. Called a greave, it was hammered from a single thick sheet of silver and symmetrically decorated with gilded animals, both real (lions) and imagined (griffins).
Covering the knee is the head of a goddess, the brow above her two wide-open eyes adorned with a victor’s wreath. (Nearby, a vitrine holds a spectacular, oversize oak wreath, delicately assembled from snipped sheets of gold and wire, found laid atop the head of an aristocratic grave.) Horizontal bands of silver and gold march in a rhythmic pattern down the right side of the goddess’ face, ornament that may represent the elaborate body tattoos popular among Thracians. The pattern’s strict rectilinear geometry creates a stark contrast with organic facial features, vivifying the otherworldly human form.
The exhibition’s most riveting work, sure to have been a popular favorite, is the roughly life-size bronze head of Seuthes III, a Thracian king almost contemporary with, if perhaps slightly younger than, Macedonian Alexander the Great. Metalwork was a highly refined practice in Thrace, evidenced throughout the exhibition, nowhere more beautifully demonstrated than here. Some scholars also think the head might have been fabricated in Greece, given the close relationship between the two regions — an Athenian commission brought to Thrace to mark a neighboring king’s grave.
The state of preservation for the 2,300-year-old bronze is pretty remarkable. The neck’s jagged base suggests that the head was torn from a larger, perhaps full-length figure, but the sculpture reveals almost no other significant damage. A deep brown patina radiates a glow of dark greenish tint. The gently furrowed brow, crow’s feet fanning out at the eyes, a full beard as dynamic as a waterfall and broad handlebar mustache together yield a sense of age embodying experienced wisdom.
So carefully observed are the head’s features that even a small wart marks the left cheek. What astounds, though, are the sculpture’s extraordinary eyes. The king stares intently into an eternal distance through composite orbs fashioned from alabaster and glass, rendered in varying degrees of clarity, transparency and opacity. Rimmed with delicate lashes of thinly shredded, light-reflective copper, the luminous eyes sparkle. It’s a dramatic tour de force.
The exhibition was organized by Getty curators Sara E. Cole and Jens Daehner and former curator Jeffrey Spier, together with Margarit Damyanov, a professor of Thracian archaeology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. It is divided into three sections, opening with interactions between Thrace and neighboring Greece and Persia — the former generally friendlier than the latter but all three cosmopolitan thanks to trade and stylistic mingling. The room’s most impressive object is a 5th century BC carved marble stele, 8 feet tall. The funerary marker features the torqued and compressed figure of an old man, who offers a piece of meat to an eager dog — a rare moment of compassion. The canine rises up on its hind legs in an almost prayer-like pose that fuses desire and fealty.
The second room is focused on archaeological tomb discoveries, including the bronze head of Seuthes, the silver greave and the gold wreath. The final room is a treasure house of luxury objects, including an exquisite saucer, nearly 10 inches in diameter, featuring three concentric rings, each composed of 24 embossed heads of Black African men in increasing size.
Together with its deeply researched catalog of recent scholarly inquiry into the tribal culture, “Ancient Thrace and the Classical World” is the third in a fine series of Getty shows that mean to provide larger context for the museum’s collection of mostly Greek and Roman antiquities. It joins studies of Egypt in 2018 and Persia in 2022. The current exhibition can only sketch the art of a period that lasted around two millennia, from about 1700 BC to AD 300, but it stands as a marvelous introduction.
The Thrace exhibition’s fate may echo what happened to the engaging “Where the Truth Lies: The Art of Qiu Ying,” which COVID abruptly shuttered at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art five years ago. The Thrace show was scheduled to close March 3, and impressive loans of art from Eastern Europe will need to be returned. The fine exhibition catalog is worth perusing.
The epic destruction that surrounds the Villa today adds an unnerving element to the exhibition’s art historical context. It’s easy to forget that the Villa is based on an ancient Roman house buried and destroyed in the lava of the erupting Mt. Vesuvius. Civilizations are inevitably transient — rising, expanding, collapsing, disappearing. Relatively obscure Thracian art, for all its muscular power and authority, is a sobering reminder of our common fragility.
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