As beautiful as the ancient Greek body

Featuring over 100 treasures from the British Museum's eminent Greek and Roman collection - never before seen in Australia - the exhibition 'The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece' opens Saturday at Bendigo Art Gallery


It may not be the gold rush of the 19th century, but the Victorian regional city of Bendigo has been attracting up to 300,000 visitors a year lately. 
And when tourists and Australians from around the continent flood its Main Street – the vibe is visible and felt in local businesses. 


Ancient Greeks invented the human body. This is a slightly peculiar thing to claim, but what I mean by it is that the Greeks were the first ones to think about the human body as we think about it today, as an object of beauty and a bearer of meaning. Curator Ian Jenkins

What has been attracting us more than ever to this town, firmly positioned within Australian history – with its Victorian architecture witnessing the wealth Bendigo once enjoyed as a gold mining area – is Bendigo Art Gallery, itself founded during that golden age of the 19th century.

Referred to with certainty as Victoria’s ‘hottest arts precinct outside Melbourne’ – and with the confidence of its enthusiastic leaders – as the best regional gallery in the whole of Australia, Bendigo Art Gallery did the unprecedented when two years ago it gained the trust of an institution as eminent as the British Museum, to host one of its most prestigious collections.


From Saturday 2 August to 9 November 2014, Bendigo will be home to 126 treasures from the British Museum’s famous Greek and Roman collection, as it hosts the exclusive exhibition ‘The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece’ for the first time in Australia.
After touring venues in Europe, Asia and America, the exhibition is coming for its final showing in Australia, exclusive to Bendigo Art Gallery as part of its highly successful Bendigo International Collections series. 


For the staff behind the scenes of the biggest exhibition ever to come to an Australian regional town, the process of securing the exhibition was an intense one, but very rewarding and exciting as well. 
The exhibition has been touring the world since 2007, but it was the recent successes of Bendigo Art Gallery – like working with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London – that set them up to prove to the British Museum that they were capable of delivering amazing exhibitions in a city of just 105,000. 


“It was back in 2011/2012 when we first found that the British Museum had this exhibition available for touring in Australia – so we have been in discussion and planning ever since then. It has been a process of two and a half years,” curator of the exhibition, Sandra Bruce, tells Neos Kosmos. 


And to get an acclaimed exhibition like this to come to a regional Victorian town – when most of the artefacts featured have never been seen outside the UK before – is not the easiest task. 


“You really have to prove that you’ve already done it. There is a lot of behind-the-scenes administration that goes on in terms of having to make sure that you’ve got all adequate and appropriate things in place like security, type of building, type of temperature control… It’s quite complex to tick all of those boxes so that the British Museum says OK. And we did it!”


It is needless to say what an exhibition of this calibre means for the City of Greater Bendigo, which has previously drawn huge arts crowds – 152,000 people and $16 million in tourism revenue in 2012 with the exhibition ‘Grace Kelly: Style Icon’, and 76,000 for ‘The White Wedding Dress: 200 years of wedding fashions’ in 2011. 


“We know for a fact that people are coming to see us when we manage to secure these exclusive shows. We think we’ve set ourselves up quite well in past times. Our community really gets behind us – when we had a Grace Kelly exhibition, local shop owners were putting up displays of Grace Kelly in their front windows and it became a real festival.”


The same large numbers are expected for ‘The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece’, the third exhibition in the Bendigo International Collection series. 
Featured alongside it will be the exhibition ‘Undressed: 350 Years of Underwear in Fashion’ (19 July – 26 October, 2014) from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, a show about everything to do with undergarments.


The City of Bendigo’s director of City Futures, Stan Liacos, says it is investment in arts and culture that drives promotion of Bendigo nationally. 


“What we have found is that in many ways, symbolically, the growth and promotion of arts and culture have led to the economic revival of Bendigo.

“A lot of people are surprised – why would a small place be doing this? But we do some very big and courageous things in Bendigo.”


With most of the gallery exhibitions attracting over 75,000, Liacos says the city has found its niche. 


“Our regional cities – Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo – they are all growing very fast, booming. We all try to get the attention – to attract people not just to visit but to attract investment, new residents… And the Art Gallery has been a great way for Bendigo to attract attention. We invest heavily in art, not just for tourism but for long term economic gain, and it’s working.”


It may have been hard to convince the British Museum – which has not toured much in Australia – why Bendigo?
 Bringing this heavy exhibition to a regional town involved some business risk as well, Liacos says.


“One year we attracted 300,000. Our population is 105,000. That’s a lot of people. And when you attract that you can see it on the street, everyone feels it in Bendigo. 


“That means a lot of income for the economy. But it’s not just about the money – it’s that we’ve been able to improve our image, more people are coming to live here, coming to visit.”



The Body Beautiful



Curated by Ian Jenkins, renowned British Museum senior curator, and a world authority on Greek architecture, sculpture and ancient Greek social history, the exhibition at Bendigo Art Gallery explores the human condition seen through ancient Greek eyes, through the artworks that have shaped the way we think about and look at ourselves.

The first version of this exhibition originated with the Olympic Games of Beijing in 2008 when it was shown in Shanghai and Hong Kong.

There was such great interest in the exhibition from other museums in the Far East, curator Ian Jenkins tells Neos Kosmos, that the British Museum decided to develop from that exhibition a different take on the idea of the human body in Greek art and thought.

It was the ancient Greeks who invented the modern idea of the human body in art as an object of sensory delight.

For over 2,000 years they experimented with representing the human body, in works that range from prehistoric abstract simplicity to the full-blown realism of the age of Alexander the Great, Bendigo Art Gallery Curator Sandra Bruce explains.



“They would go from abstract simplicity to very realistic artwork – you see over the course of 200-300 years how the skills of their sculptors developed, and where they did start from quite simple geometrical forms to represent the male form, and then all of a sudden – well, over the course of 200 years more likely – they got all this technical proficiency which makes the human form look more natural and more detailed. 


“And it just goes from strength to strength. You look at how they carved the drapery over female forms out of marble and you think you are looking at translucent cloth – their technique was absolutely exquisite.”


To represent the human body was a basic human instinct. But according to Ian Jenkins, the Greeks were exemplary in their pursuit to represent the body as an object of beauty and bearer of great meaning. 


The exhibition is expected to transport visitors back in time to ancient sites that were central to the subject and presentation of Greek art, to Olympia and the Acropolis.


“Ancient Greeks invented the human body. This is a slightly peculiar thing to claim, but what I mean by it is that the Greeks were the first ones to think about the human body as we think about it today.

“For the Ancient Greeks, the human body provided a pictorial language by which to articulate their ideas about the world and the place of human beings in it. So, for example, the Ancient Greeks did not represent their gods like the Egyptians and Assyrians as animal headed monsters, but they showed them as human beings albeit larger than life and immortal, but otherwise sharing the physical and psychological attributes of humans.”

One of the most striking features of the Greek male body in particular, according to Mr Jenkins, is the tendency to public nudity.

“Assyria, Egypt and Ancient Persia regarded the naked human body as shameful and depicted it in war in a very negative way – always the victim rather than the conqueror, while the Greeks used nudity as a way of elevating Greek warriors to the status of heroes.”

Fascination with human form was always represented. But, as Bendigo Art Gallery curator Sandra Bruce agrees, one thing that the ancient Greeks did and as far as we understand within the Western civilization they were the first to do it – they recognised just the beauty of the human body for its own sake. 


“When they are doing things like Discobolus they are basically saying – ‘look at how beautiful the human body can be’,” Sandra says passionately. 

With 126 artworks spanning across four millennia – including 10 pieces of free-standing sculpture – the highlight of the British Museum’s collection is Discobolus, a marble Roman copy of the famous sculpture made by Myron in 5th century BC.

The sculpture, carved in 2nd century AD has never been on loan before this tour, neither have many other artefacts in the exhibition.


“He is what we think everybody will definitely want to see. The ancient Romans admired the work of Ancient Greeks so much that they started doing their own version of it. It’s like the Ancient Romans recognised even back than how awesome the Ancient Greeks were. They emulated architecture, sculptures…

“All objects are from the British Museum’s department of Greece and Rome, all antiquities – they are all real things, no replicas. It’s literally huge and very heavy exhibition that comes in two shipments.”

The earliest piece at the exhibition dates from 2600 BC – it’s a beautiful stone carving of a female form, a kind of fertility symbol. 


Also, included for display in Bendigo is the statue The Strength of Apollo that hasn’t been included in other parts of the international tour.

Apart from Discobolus who, in Mr Jenkins’ opinion, is the one that most people recognise with its association with the ancient Olympic games, many are star objects of the exhibition.

“There are others like the full length portrait of Socrates, the only one in the world. Also, the wonderful bronze figure of Zeus enthroned with his sceptre and thunderbolt – his head incidentally was used for the obverse of the winner’s medal at the first revived Olympic Games in Athens in 1896.”
In what will be the largest show Bendigo Art Gallery ever had to deliver, and the precedent for the British Museum that for the first time is touring an exhibition to a regional Australian venue, Sandra Bruce says all their efforts went into it. 


“We want to deliver to a standard that people would expect to see in any gallery around the world. 


“I would like to see as many Greek people as possible in Bendigo during this time. I think that it’s great to get everybody’s opinion on an exhibition like this, but obviously from people from whose culture we are drawing on for this exhibition – we would be so proud to be able to show it off to them.”


Greek connection



For Stan Liacos, who was part of the team that went to London to secure The Body Beautiful, it was his personal – Greek connection – that made the exhibition that bit more special for him.



”As a Greek I’m proud to be part of it, but I would love to see the Greeks consider coming up and they won’t be disappointed. 


“What we are bringing has never toured Australia before, it is very rare for the British Museum to bring things out, and the fact that the exhibition is focusing on Greek heritage, Greek antiquities is something we should be very proud of.”

Born in Australia, once the Manager of Marketing of Federation Square and Melbourne Docklands, Stan took over the position in Bendigo eight and a half years ago. He hasn’t looked back, nor did his family.


Under his belt, as the head of the City Futures, he now has Major Projects, Economic Development, Tourism and Destination Marketing, Bendigo Art Gallery, Bendigo Airport and many other responsibilities.

Lately, Bendigo has been the fastest growing city in regional Victoria, with only 5,5 per cent unemployment rate.


In Bendigo, Stan tells, gallery is not just about culture – it’s also seen as economic attractor. 


He now hopes he will see that little spark of civic pride generated as Greek flock to Bendigo to see the collection of Ancient Greek artefacts.

“It’s a showcase of Greek Ancient culture but what I love about it is the focus on the purity and the perfection of the human body, and how the Greeks particularly immortalised the beautiful male body, but it’s also about the notion of sexuality and even homosexuality.

“The Greeks are very proud people. We haven’t appreciated some of the ridicule that has happened in the last 5-6 year through economic crisis, so for me I’d love to see a little spark of a civic pride generated through this exhibition. 
Because this is when Greeks rule the world. And so much what we know today was inspired through the early Greek or Roman era.”

Exhibition The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece is on from 2 August to 9 November 2014, at Bendigo Art Gallery, 42 View St, Bendigo. For more information, visit www.bendigoartgallery.com.au