The ancient Greek kingdom of Pylos is nowhere near as familiar in today’s popular consciousness as city-states with names like Corinth or Thebes, but it did get a shout-out from Homer in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Due west of Sparta, not far from the coast of the Ionian Sea, Pylos was home to the massive, so-called Palace of Nestor — a two-story extravaganza of four buildings with more than 100 rooms in 160,000 square feet, built for a powerful ruler whose connection to the legendary Nestor is just a poetic guess. The palace was said to have provided shelter to Telemachus, son of Odysseus and Penelope and a player in epic tales of the Trojan War’s aftermath.
The captivating exhibition “The Kingdom of Pylos: Warrior-Princes of Ancient Greece” at the Getty Villa is the first since January’s devastating Palisades fire shuttered the place for more than five months. It’s a sobering experience to drive onto the Villa grounds. Surrounding hillsides, significantly denuded of plant life, are dotted with scores of freshly cut stumps. They’re residue of felled trees that burned in the horrific Palisades conflagration. The fire came within a few feet of the Villa, famously a re-creation of an ancient Roman country home that was buried beneath the huge volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
The Palace of Nestor itself burned to the ground around 1180 BCE. (Why it burned is unknown.) Ironically, the intense heat of the destruction baked otherwise fragile clay tablets, their deciphered texts — the earliest written form of the Greek language — revealing routine aspects of daily life in late Bronze Age Greece (1700–1070 BCE). A few preserved tablets are displayed in the exhibition.
The show was ably organized by Getty curator Claire Lyons and curatorial assistant Nicole Budrovich, who worked with archaeologists and scholars at the Hellenic Ministry of Culture in Athens and the University of Cincinnati in Ohio. Each of four concise galleries has a single theme. First is the palace; next is a mysterious aristocrat known only as the Griffin Warrior; then comes exploration of beehive-shaped burial mounds; and, finally, artistic production in provinces around Pylos.
The second room is the show’s beating heart. There, the Griffin Warrior makes his appearance.
Nobody knows his identity, but he was very rich. His undisturbed tomb — a stone-lined shaft older than the nearby Palace of Nestor and unearthed intact by Cincinnati archaeologists only 10 years ago — was filled with thousands of objects, from weaponry to gold and gems. Next to the skeleton, an ivory box carved with the image of a lion attacking a griffin, a mythological creature with the winged body of a lion and the head of an eagle, which gave the unidentified warrior his name.
What the powerful, 30-something Griffin Warrior looked like is not something I’d expect to know 3,500 years after his death. But there he is, looking on in a frontal mugshot pinned to the gallery wall. He’s a dashing, square-jawed, clean-shaven matinee idol with a luxurious head of long, curly black hair. Imagine the latest Hollywood superhero emerging from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The handsome face is a digital photograph fabricated through sophisticated forensic techniques currently used by law enforcement to determine things like the appearance of murder victims. Armed with skeletal DNA, Tobias Houlton, a specialist in craniofacial reconstruction, produced a model derived from multiple views of the warrior’s skull, which was crushed in an ancient tomb collapse. Houlton inserted eyes, then overlaid the model with layers of tissue, muscles and skin. Voila!
Adjacent to the entombed Griffin Warrior’s wrist was a carved and gold-tipped agate, almond-shaped and just 1.3 inches in length, here making its public debut outside Europe. Its minuscule, deeply engraved surface carving is barely legible to the naked eye, but Getty curators produced a searchable video that is jaw-dropping in the fierce drama that is exposed. The touch-screen is installed next to the agate.
The tiny but exquisite intaglio shows two lean but muscled warriors going at it in shallow three-dimensional space. One plunges a big sword downward near the collarbone of the other, who fruitlessly twists his body behind a massive shield, while a third fighter lays already vanquished, sprawling dramatically at their feet. The marvelous composition is perfectly fitted to the stone’s shape.
The seal stone is called the Pylos Combat Agate. Surely the brilliant carving was executed with the aid of a magnifying lens, perhaps made from a piece of rock crystal. Lenses didn’t become common studio tools for European artists until the 15th century and into the cusp of the modern era, just before the invention of photography, from Jan van Eyck in the Netherlands to J.A.D. Ingres in France. Hobbyists make microminiature sculptures today, like those by Hagop Sandaldjian that fit inside the eye of a needle, shown at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. But the gorgeous Pylos seal stone is of a different order. The timeline for lens-enhanced masterpieces gets pushed back 35 centuries.
In the process, the little bombshell also upends the timeline for ancient Greek art. Idealized depictions of the naturalistic human form didn’t flourish in the region for another thousand years — the so-called Golden Age of the classical era. Discovered in a rather remote seaside region of the Peloponnesian peninsula, rather than an established Greek artistic center, the Pylos Combat Agate might have been made in Crete, a prominent trading partner. (Many scholars connect its style to Minoan art.) That would make the precious import an especially prized possession of the Griffin Warrior. Whatever the case, long-settled art history has gotten a jolt.
Remarkably, most of the displayed objects throughout the captivating show are small — beads, pendants, signet rings, sword handles, earrings, cups, little gold appliques to be sewn into funeral shrouds, somewhat clumsy clay figurines and more than two dozen petite seal stones — carved nuggets or embossed metals used as a personal signature for their owners. The Griffin Warrior was buried with around 50 of them, while even the victor engraved into the Pylos Combat Agate has a seal stone tied to his wrist.
The first room features artifacts excavated from around the Palace of Nestor. A helpful digital “fly through” video reconstructs the vast fortress, elaborately decorated with brightly colored, often patterned murals. Nearby, lovely reconstructions in watercolor and gouache of several wall paintings were made onsite around 1960 by the well-known British archaeological illustrator, Piet de Jong.
Take them with a grain of salt, however: De Jong, then in his 70s, was very experienced but not formally trained in archaeology. He was certainly careful to articulate which sections of his informed reconstructions came from actual mural fragments, painting those irregular shapes in deeper hues, like dispersed puzzle pieces. Still, large areas of the graceful drawings, the most charming ones showing flat silhouettes of crouching hunting dogs, are speculative. And surely the hellacious fire that destroyed the palace altered the mural colors from which the illustrator worked. His watercolors do give a strong idea of what was originally there, but the full conception remains uncertain.
The most beautiful object in the room is a large clay vessel, just over two feet tall, commanding a spot right inside the entry. The off-white form of the rustic terracotta jar, shattered over millenniums and fastidiously reassembled, is elegantly decorated in rich brown and black designs, including bursts of rosettes and abstract squiggles. They animate the jar’s swelling surface, its bulge already emphasized by wide black bands around the neck and foot. The bands, top and bottom, create visual compression to enhance the ballooning form in between.
Most prominent in the decoration is sinuous ivy, which curls around the entire vessel. The evergreen perennial’s triangular leaves are tipped with spirals, a primordial motif suggesting life’s eternal cycles. The vessel is, unsurprisingly, a funerary jar — and a knockout of ceramic art.
The third gallery looks at burial practices, a primary source for the historical artifacts on display. In the final room, amid a selection of weapons for hunting and for warfare, a head-hugging warrior’s helmet made from boars’ tusks indicates its owner’s fearlessness in gathering the necessary materials from slaying the ferocious wild beasts. (A similar helmet was found in the Griffin Warrior’s tomb.) The show’s thorough, wonderfully readable catalog refers to the power of “funerary magnificence” in the kingdom’s social structure. Generous evidence is offered throughout the compelling Getty Villa exhibition.
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