Chalice krater depicting Jason with the Golden Fleece, attributed to the Underworld Painter, second half of 4th century BCE; Louvre Museum, Paris
The Golden Fleece glows on a Greek vase depicting Jason handing the coveted prize to his uncle King Pelias as Medea, Jason’s Georgian confederate, seems on. The legendary ram’s fleece talked about by Homer was seized in Colchis – immediately’s western Georgia – after the Argonauts voyaged east throughout the Black Sea, a era earlier than the Trojan battle. Whereas the legend would possibly allude to sheepskins used to assemble gold mud from Caucasus mountain streams, the vase – from 4th-century-BCE Apulia in Italy – testifies not solely to Georgia’s famend wealth in antiquity but additionally to its contact with classical Greece.
Close by, an beautiful pair of gold temple pendants from the identical interval, every bearing two tiny horses, combines Georgian goldsmithery with motifs from Persia’s Achaemenid dynasty. Along with the Louvre krater, such treasures from the Georgian Nationwide Museum in Tbilisi spotlight an historic land crossed by commerce routes that linked India, China and Iran to Greece and Italy.
These objects from a Janus-faced tradition that appears each methods are on present in Georgia: A Story of Encounters, on the Artwork & Historical past Museum in Brussels till 18 February. It’s the largest worldwide exhibition in a century on the cultural heritage of this impartial nation within the South Caucasus – nonetheless little identified to a lot of the world. Spanning the neolithic interval to a medieval Golden Age, the present presents Georgia as a Silk Route crossroads the place Europe meets Asia, that has absorbed influences from each east and west.
Georgian artists, to today, have freely absorbed each Western and Japanese artwork varieties, whether or not through Zoroastrian, Byzantine, Islamic or different cultures. In a manuscripts part, bibles in Georgian script sit alongside Georgia’s nationwide poem
The exhibition is a cornerstone of Europalia Georgia, a four-month cultural season throughout Belgium. The season has been well timed as Georgia joins Ukraine and different former Russian colonies in asserting (…)
Full article: 2 527 phrases.
This text may be learn by subscribers
Maya Jaggi
Maya Jaggi is a author, contributing artwork critic for FT Weekend and Founding Director of the Oxford Literary Pageant’s Programme of Georgian Literature & Tradition, launching in March 2024. She can also be impartial Chair of Judges of the European Financial institution for Reconstruction and Improvement (EBRD) Literature Prize 2024.
