Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece digs into an old, familiar story and largely debunks it. Anyone educated in the West grew up with a narrative of us v, the East that’s lasted for more than 2,000 years. The Greeks started it, telling us their democratic, egalitarian, plain-living lifestyle is what ultimately triumphed over the luxury-loving Persians. That’s because all that extravagance, mixed with an authoritarian monarchy, made the Persians weak, effeminate and lazy. You don’t need to be a classical scholar to have drunk this in. Just watch 300 … or any grass-roots politician railing against elites … to see the dynamic alive and well.
Yes, there’s a lot of blingy Persian luxury in these galleries … and that’s probably the main reason for going … but you’ll also learn how the Persian establishment promoted and strategically deployed that luxury to keep power. And you’ll see copious proof of hypocritical Greeks, protesting against luxury but creating and using Hellenised versions for themselves.
If there’s one item that summarises the whole idea of luxury here, it’s a rhyton; and there are a lot of them here. A rhyton is a horn-shaped container used for drinking ceremonies, usually featuring animals but sometimes people. Contrary to appearances, however, you don’t drink out of it. You hold it in one hand, your shallow drinking bowl in another, then a servant pours wine into the rhyton, which emits the liquid from a hole in its front in a steady stream which you’re supposed to catch in your bowl. This is the kind of ritual you only design to show off, and the amount of coordination required to drink this way would take a lot of practice. Which you’d probably be willing to do if your barware was this extraordinary.
A set of silver blockbusters hits you on entry: not just the elegant griffin that’s on the exhibition poster but an antelope, a man on a horse and several others along with examples of the drinking bowls they’d spout into. There are other lovely examples throughout the show, culminating in the eight glimmering objects of desire … some animals, some human heads … from Bulgaria’s Panagyurishte treasure. Whatever their composition, you’d stand in amazement at their delicate workmanship. The sinuous buck’s horns. The proud female heads. The boldly-rearing centaurs on an unusual, vase-shaped rhyton with two holes, probably designed to cement peace treaties (and guard against poison) by spouting out two servings at once. But the fact that these are all made from glistening, solid gold kicks the wonder up to another level.
The last piece in the exhibition is a Roman glass model, from hundreds of years later and now meant to be drunk from directly, with the hole filled in. It’s a nod to the enduring love of this glamorous design, and the fact that the Romans carried on the luxury debate and hypocrisy.
From the Greeks, we get a whole case of their version of the rhyton, more miracles of animal artistry but here made from glazed terra cotta to protest their humility. Pushing from aping the tradition to full hypocrisy is a ruler from the Greek world, immortalised in a panel from the Nereid Monument brought up from its usual home downstairs, who is showing off the whole two-handed serving technique. Don’t miss the marvellous human touch of his dog crouched beneath his couch, perhaps waiting to clean up spills.
These objects alone would almost be enough for the show. But we go much further. Jewellery, housewares, clothing and decorative objects all show off the Persian flare for conspicuous consumption and the Greek’s grudging, democratised copies.
A particularly innovative aspect of the show is incorporating videos of modern craftspeople creating the same opulent objects today. One shows the creation of the colour purple, from the harvesting of a particular gland of the Murex snail to its boiling or drying to get various forms of pigment. In another, a modern Japanese glass artist demonstrates how coloured glass rods get heated, wrapped around a plaster core then smoothed together to create an exact copy of an ancient bowl on display next to the screen. Most fun is a modern textile artist, using ancient sources to weave and recreate a royal outfit, complete with dangling golden lion’s heads and enamelled metal trim. Met Gala catwalk, eat your heart out.
This isn’t a large show. It’s up in the galleries above the Reading Room, not in the main exhibition space. But every item within it is a rare joy. By bringing it all together in this context the curators have elevated things you might have walked past for years into a treasury of precious objects that will drop your jaw and leave you wanting to win the lottery. You can go out afterwards for a bit of wine and some discussion on whether luxury makes you weak. Maybe even with a rhyton. But I’d wear a bib. We haven’t lost our taste for extravagance, but I suspect we have given up the knack for showy, two-handed alcohol consumption.
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