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See Yourself in Stone

 
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For most of human history, victors have been vandals – ransacking the property and the bodies of the people they overpowered. Nothing “problematic” about it for thousands of years; the spoils were the point of war, not a coincident ethical dilemma. You strip your conquest bare, haul the riches back to home base, revel in the exotic tokens of your might. The display of seized objects from other cultures has always been a complex act – a tangle of subordination and appreciation; the power dynamics of the specific and the transportive power of the universal intertwined. We are aesthetic, aggressive creatures, and never more so than when we step over broken bodies and shattered societies to pluck the art out of the ruins we’ve made, wrap it carefully, and take it home as treasure.

Not every conqueror kicks down the door, of course – some wield ideas, concepts to sublimate the violence of pillage. They talk their way into the temple, under the invisible authority of empire or cultural preservation or anthropology. They organize work crews to pry the past away, fill out shipping manifests, and give their plunder a proper name, a catalog number, a place under glass in a special building back home. They do it, they say, for love; to exalt and save. To guard the inheritance of mankind from indifference and neglect. They have filled museums the world over with objects of breathtaking splendor, disseminating the brilliance of the human community farther than war spoils have ever gone before.  

History is storytelling, and narration is inescapably an expression of power – what we tell, and how, literally makes the world. If you love history, and the story of history in ancient objects, you can’t escape the history of history itself. It matters how these objects got to Fifth Avenue or Great Russell Street from the far reaches of the world. You see these extractions under soft light, in a climate-controlled room thousands of miles away from their origin, radiant and incongruous and transcendent, and the extraordinary strangeness of their existence in this space saturates the experience. Communing with the past in central London on a gray November afternoon, you wonder if the blank spaces the professed guardians leave behind are any different, in the end, than the cavities left behind by the goons. Does it matter to the makers, to their heirs, whether the takers were surgeons or butchers – extricated with precision or hacked rough from a thousand-year home, loss is loss.  

You think of all of this in front of the Elgin Marbles, of course, but the question of origin and acquisition permeates almost every room of the British Museum (and many other museums around the world). The building triggers a kind of double consciousness at first view from the street, its very existence provoking fascination and stimulation; conflict and critique. It’s a lot, in more ways than it means to be. Maybe that’s inevitable for any endeavor to tell the human story.

No matter how the debate plays out in your head over how the institution should function in the modern world, there are extraordinary moments to be had in this complicated space – moments of discovery and communion and revelation that can only occur when we are in the physical presence of the past. Best of all are the moments when these objects subvert the canon of Western history in unexpected ways, reminding us of the vast majority of human experience that goes unremarked, unacknowledged by the art and literature and history-making of the powerful.

Like the bust of Lysimache, one of the most beautiful, arresting objects I’ve ever seen in any museum, if only for the sheer surprise of its existence.

The British Museum identifies this marble sculpture, a Roman copy of a lost Greek bronze, as “portrait head of an old woman, sometimes identified as Lysimache, priestess of Athena.” The bust is unlikely to be the actual statue referenced in classica…

The British Museum identifies this marble sculpture, a Roman copy of a lost Greek bronze, as “portrait head of an old woman, sometimes identified as Lysimache, priestess of Athena.” The bust is unlikely to be the actual statue referenced in classical literature, of a 64-year old priestess, but “Lysimache” is a good stand-in for the archetype all the same.

The first time I saw her, I stared through the glass for a solid minute or so, stunned. It’s rare to ever see an artistic portrayal of a fully mature woman in the richness of her age, and I’ve personally never seen one from the classical world. The only women I’ve ever seen in classical sculpture are youthful, or supernaturally timeless - nymphs and goddesses, mostly, and otherwise beautiful creatures whose radiance is almost relentlessly smooth. Their figures express a very narrow kind of loveliness that seems irresistible to so many male artists over the millennia – fragile, fecund, blank.

Lysimache is none of these things.

She is no waiting vessel, this one; no incarnation of promise. Lysimache has already lived, has already seen. Any children are long since borne or raised, any unworldliness broken. The stone doesn’t hide the press of life against her skin, denying the force of nature; it sings out the years. For thousands of years, mainstream culture has pounded out a monotonous, egregiously false message that women’s worth lies entirely in youthful beauty, and Lysimache shows us a just a miniscule glimpse of what art has lost – what we have lost – in making the rest of our humanity invisible. We have been starved of a whole spectrum of human experience, and art is profoundly impoverished for it. The absence is appalling, morally and aesthetically. I have no idea what the original intention for the Lysimache bust was, or its use, and I’m not sure that it matters – not to my heart anyway. For me, Lysimache is the rare depiction of female maturity as heroic, and no grubby historicism will undo that.

Lysimache’s portrait is remarkable for her unapologetic humanity, and her novelty is celebration and lament all at once. In the rooms just outside her current resting place, there are dozens of depictions of men from the classical world. Almost all of them are around her age; none of them could be mistaken for Adonis. They were honored in stone not as objects of simple aesthetic pleasure, but as manifestations of inner life – leaders, warriors, orators. They don’t exude the kind of vacant welcome that depictions of women so often do; their energy is outward-facing, animated. Most of them are serious, even grim; some are openly ruthless. These statues depict character, not mere physicality, an effort almost never undertaken for women even in our day.

One of the most powerful pieces is a bust thought to portray Julius Caesar. Badly damaged and fairly worn, it’s still extraordinarily powerful.

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 To my eye, seeing only half of this face, whoever he was, only makes its resolve more chilling – like seeing a mountain cut away, and appreciating its astounding mass all the more for it. The half-Caesar illustrates how little the eye needs to register a whole wealth of understanding; how much that is invisible, ineffable, can be expressed in rock when we believe there is something important to say.

It matters when half a Caesar says more than almost every depiction of women ever has. It matters that Lysimache stands alone in the next room, slenderest thread leading back to half the population of the ancient world who are nearly vanished from our collective eye.  The fact that Lysimache is such a rarity in heroic art – that we almost never see the frank, even admiring, depiction of age in a woman’s face – shapes our understanding of when women are worth seeing, what about them is worth showing and preserving. In a language that is older, more primal than words, art organizes objects and ideas, building our identities even as it seeks to capture and illustrate them.

These are the stories we tell ourselves to be ourselves, and if you ever doubt that this process is central to the human condition, just think of what we do to make them, keep them. Think of how we step over broken bodies to touch them, the thousands of miles we cart them back home, the things we tell ourselves to avoid letting them go back to the places where they were born, for fear they won’t be treasure enough to anyone else but us.

Visit the British Museum.

Think about the absurdity, the incongruity of its existence.

Find the half-Caesar, and keep walking to find Lysimache. See how it feels to find a new kind of hero, equally yours and not.

Hannah Alejandro