Christy Papadopoulou

 

TENDER, bittersweet or cruel, Eros is at the heart of a grand exhibition at the Museum of Cycladic Art which, against all lust-related taboos, spans the diverse manifestations of the Greek god - or daemon - of love throughout a millennium. 

 

Eros: From Hesiod’s Theogony to Late Antiquity stretches back to the 6th century BC, when the first references to the winged god - known as Cupid to the Romans - were made by Hesiod. It covers the period through to the 4th century AD when Eros, who was originally second only to Chaos and Earth in the order of creation, was diminished to the role of a mere companion to Venus.

Forty-five museums in Greece, Cyprus, Italy and France, including the Louvre, have contributed more than 270 artefacts to the one-of-a-kind exhibition which organisers said took over three years to materialise. 

 

 

“With the exception of a small display in Rome in 2007 and a limited-range one in Paris in 1989, there have been no major archaeological shows on Eros thus far,” Museum of Cycladic Art director Nikos Stampolidis told a December 9 press meeting. 

 

“It is very easy to write about love, to read about love, to fall in love even, but it is extremely difficult to convey the image of love through an exhibition,” pointed out Stampolidis, who has curated the show together with museum curator Yiorgos Tassoulas.

 

In addition to being identified with sexual desire and emotional unrest, Eros was considered in antiquity an integral part of daily life, hence the plethora of adjectives - fairest of all, merciless, languishing and limb-loosener being but a few - attributed to him by ancient authors. “In  Ancient Greek, love is not just an emotion or a situation but the urge to move towards the object of desire, even when the feeling is not mutual,” said Stampolidis.

 

 

The show is arranged in nine sections, the number of Apollo’s muses. It sheds light on many aspects of life in antiquity - from religious customs and marital practices to homosexuality and prostitution. 

Among the exhibits - mainly pottery, jewellery and sculpture - there are masterpieces which, according to Stampolidis, have never before travelled outside their museum of origin.

 

This is the case with the Louvre’s winged Eros stringing his bow - a Roman marble copy of sculptor Lysippus’ bronze original - as well as with a 2nd century AD marble group of the god embracing and kissing goddess of the soul Psyche, from Rome’s Capitoline Museums.

 

Though in Hesiod’s Theogony Eros is said to have existed before the birth of Venus, lyric poets and Sappho in particular see him as a descendant of Aphrodite. The affectionate mother-son relationship is reproduced in nursing scenes which are strongly reminiscent of Christian representations of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Christ. In another exhibit, the disobedient boy is spanked with a sandal for misbehaving. 

 

Elsewhere, Eros is pictured amid lush vegetation, hinting at fertility, and, in a more Dionysian rendition, he is a lyre or guitar bearer who uses his musical talent as a vehicle to trigger feelings of love.

 

Mischievous by nature, Eros points his arrows in all directions, making no distinction between mortals and gods. Zeus, for example, is depicted taking on different forms - a bull, a swan or an eagle - in order to conquer the object of his desire. Less frequent is the iconographic type of the sleeping Eros, which is encountered in funerary art in Hellenistic and Roman sculpture.

 

 

Some of the exhibits have a romantic feel to them, such as a love note by a young man addressed to his beloved, bidding her to come “with as much haste as possible”.

 

Sealed away from underaged viewers - a warning advises parents to accompany children under 16 - the first-floor display contains graphic sex scenes representing couples in various configurations. Exhibits include the recreation of a room from a Roman brothel excavated in Pompeii, vases illustrated with homoerotic love scenes, phallus-shaped lamps, even a stone altar shaped after a magnified phallus.

 

The contemporary practice of carrying phallic images in procession, which has survived in the sex-teasing carnival of Bourani in Tyrnavos, has its seeds in the use of the phallus as an apotropaic symbol to warn off the evil eye. Houses often had a stone phallus on their front door or exterior wall to protect them from envy and small boys would wear a phallus-shaped amulet to shield them from the evil eye.

 

“Nothing should be forbidden within the context of a museum,” Stampolidis asserts. “After all, Greek culture stands out for its sense of tolerance, not guilt. It’s all a matter of education.”