Ancient Greek bronzes from 34 museums in 13 countries on four continents have united under the umbrella of a remarkable show which will run until 1 November at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.
The travelling exhibition, which wowed the visitors of the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, brings together 50 ancient bronzes to Los Angeles, and will proceed in November to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.
Entitled ‘Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World’, the exhibition focuses primarily on Greek and Roman works of the Hellenistic period – from the death of Alexander the Great in 323BC to the 2nd century AD – it also includes significant works from the fifth and fourth centuries BC, the so-called ‘Classical period’ of ancient Greece.

Amongst the highlights of the show is the Seated Boxer from the Museo Nazionale Romano di Palazzo Massimo in Rome.
This astonishing Greek work from the third century BC offers a larger than life-sized nude man of mature age, who appears to be resting after what appears to have been a gruelling boxing match, for he exhibits cauliflower ears, a broken nose, and a swollen right cheek disfigured by a haematoma – all rendered in hard-core realism by a magisterial handling of the medium of bronze-casting. The brutality of the man’s depiction arouses empathy for his wounds.
A weary Herakles from the National Museum in Baghdad, Iraq, a fourth century BC portrait head of Seuthes III from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia, and a Citizen Woman, wearing a thin chiton and himation veiled over her head, from the Miho Museum in Shigaraki, Japan are more historical artefacts of great significance.

Another work from the Getty Villa in this show is the famed Statue of An Athlete (or The Getty Bronze), which did not travel to Italy for the show’s opening in Florence due to its being the subject of litigation in Italian courts. Yet another piece from the Getty Villa in this show is the admirable bust of the Roman poet Menander.
Included in the show are several versions of a nude Greek athlete holding a strigil used for scraping oil from his body.

Two second century BC Herms of Dionysos are also on display, one from a shipwreck off the coast of Tunisia, provided by the Musée Nationale du Bardo in Tunis, and a second from the Getty Villa in Malibu.
For more information head to www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/power_pathos
Source: The Berkeley Daily Planet