Few cultural experiences can match that moment when, for the first time, you approach the great Pergamon Altar in Berlin. Because it is famous, but not as famous as the Ara Pacis or the Elgin Marbles, many visitors will encounter it in complete ignorance that something so big or so imposing has survived the destruction of the ancient world.
Much of the original altar lives on in hundreds of sculptural and architectural fragments in the Pergamon Museum that was created specifically to house them. And although the architectural scaffolding—a stage set of sorts—is entirely modern, the experience is scarcely less powerful for that. At more than 100 feet across, the altar is so big that the awed visitor is apt to forget that it represents only the entrance of an ancient sanctuary that was originally far larger. However that may be, there are few other occasions when we feel so viscerally that we are standing in direct communion with the living force of antiquity itself.
For now, the Pergamon is closed for renovations until 2019. But their loss is our gain, since a good deal of the monument, and much besides, has moved into the Metropolitan Museum as part of its new exhibition Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World. This exhibition brings together Hellenistic art and the Roman art based on it—from Egypt, mainland Greece, and Italy, no less than from the ancient Aeolian kingdom of Pergamon in Asia Minor. And although the objects on view come from collections across Europe and the United States, most are from Berlin and most were excavated in Pergamon itself.
The conquests of Alexander—from the Balkans to India and from Egypt to the Eurasian steppe—resulted in the entirely fortuitous spread of one form of Greek culture, the Athenian, and one form of Greek, the Attic dialect, across much of what Edward Gibbon described as “the fairest part of the earth and the most civilized portion of mankind.” Of the several dynasties that emerged from the cataclysmic breakup of Alexander’s empire at his death in 323 b.c., none was richer or more splendid than the kingdom of Pergamon. Built on a hillside acropolis 18 miles inland from the Mediterranean, it won the enduring gratitude of the civilized world through its decisive defeat of the Galatians, a horde of semi-barbarous Celts, at the Battle of the Caecus River in 241 b.c.
The victor of that battle was the third king of the Attalid dynasty, Attalus I Soter, the Savior, so named for his services to civilization. It was he who provided the sculptural decorations for the Temple of Athena in the goddess’s sanctuary on the acropolis of Pergamon. This temple contained the first of three great sculptural series in the ancient city, a series dedicated to that victory over the Galatians. As such, it can be read as a collective sigh of relief, an ecstatic explosion of joy, at the nation’s deliverance from so savage an enemy.
A number of the sculptures from the altar have survived, but many more, like the famous Dying Gaul, live on in expert Roman copies. Literally by the dozens, perhaps by the hundreds, these works were reproduced and disseminated among the wealthy villas of the Roman world. When these copies were disinterred centuries later, they revolutionized sculpture and painting. For it was these very works that revealed to the artists of those later generations how to draw incandescent pathos from the coldness of stone.
Eumenes II had the Great Altar of Pergamon built, containing two massive sculptural programs. The larger of the two, the Gigantomachy, was a sequence of almost incalculable complexity that depicted the Olympian gods in pitched battle with the Titans who tried to storm heaven. The smaller cycle was devoted to the myth of Telephus, the son of Hercules and the mythic founder of Pergamon. Both cycles have been accounted for at the Met in an elaborate scenography that differs from that of the Pergamon Museum, even though it succeeds, with far less space at its disposal, in capturing something of the monumentality and splendor of the Berlin display.
The eye struggles to adjust to the vertiginous abundance and variety of wreathed, writhing, interlocking forms, to the muscularity and violence and grace with which the Olympians dispatch the base-born sons of Earth. These sculptures were completed three centuries after the Elgin Marbles of the Parthenon, but they affected subsequent Western art far earlier and more fundamentally than would the sculptures of the Parthenon.
The koine Greek language that spread through the known world in the wake of Alexander’s armies established a clear, flexible, and graceful instrument of expression that survived past the end of antiquity to the ultimate destruction of the Byzantine state in 1453. In the same way, it was Pergamon, with all its oratory and drama, that bequeathed to Rome, and then to the Renaissance, the dominant language of Western sculpture down to the triumph of Modernism after World War I. Everything from the Roman fountains of Bernini to the figure of Mercury atop Grand Central Station, gazing down Park Avenue South, derives in large measure from the sculptures of Pergamon.
But by concentrating on these major sculptural monuments in the Met show, I hardly do justice to many of the more than 250 objects on view. Their somewhat promiscuous dispersal across the galleries in no way detracts from the great power and even greater beauty that emerge as the constants amid the vast variety of sizes, shapes, functions, and styles that define them. These objects range from diadems and armbands to coins, perfume bottles, and a glass bucket with a silver handle.
Acknowledging the achievement of Greece and Rome has become, by now, something between a reflex and a duty, and in neither case is it undertaken with any great thought or effort, much less joy. But to see even these lesser objects at the Met, with their persistent and unerring instinct for visual ravishment, compels us suddenly, and with renewed force, to understand why we still care so greatly for the ancient societies that produced them.
James Gardner’s latest book is Buenos Aires: The Biography of a City.
