Pericles to Picasso

For its big midyear show, which opened last week, Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum had chosen an appropriately big subject: "The Classical Contribution to Western Civilization." Covering 25 centuries, the exhibition set out to demonstrate how much was owed to the Greeks and Romans by medieval, Renaissance and even modern art.

For illustration, the Met had wheeled in sculpture, painting and prints from most of its vast departments, had even borrowed a few pieces from the advance-guard Museum of Modern Art. As a result, the show was a sort of digest version of the Met itself, and as it was all in one place, a little easier on the feet of the tourists who would be dropping in all summer.

Missing Heads. Explained the Met's Curator of Prints, A. Hyatt Mayor: "It does not matter if you are aware or ignorant of the Greeks and Romans; for them or against them. They are half the facts of life for Western man."

One of the facts of life in the new Met assemblage was a Roman copy of a 5th Century B.C. Greek bronze, The Wounded Amazon. The Met had picked it because it demonstrated some of the esthetic qualities the Greeks had prized most highly: the Amazon was dead calm, despite her wounds, and a fine-tuned example of physical fitness. Unlike the stiff, staring images of earlier cultures, she looked alive and in motion.

As a basic attribute of Western sculpture, that look of motion kept reappearing throughout the Met's show. It was present in Tullio Lombardo's 15th Century Adam and in Jean Antoine Houdon's 18th Century masterpiece, The Bather. A 20th Century example was the lie de France, a nude female torso by the late great Frenchman Aristide Maillol, who had gone so far as to imitate even the damages to classical sculpture by leaving off head, arms arid feet.

Calculating Eye. Lucas Cranach's 16th Century view of the Judgment of Paris was classical in theme only. His illustration of the first beauty contest, in which Paris, after some difficulty, decided in favor of Venus, bristled with Gothic touches. Cranach had presented fast-stepping Mercury with an iron-grey beard, a studious look and a crystal ball instead of a golden apple. He had dressed Paris in the ponderous armor and plumed hat of a German prince, gave him an insufferably arrogant and calculating eye.

Like Cranach, Titian had taken his pick in the Greek Pantheon, but had added a sumptuousness of his own. His Venus and the Lute Player made the goddess look more human than divine, for his brush managed to suggest the blood beneath the opalescent skin and to impart a warmth that no marble could match. Compared with Titian's, even such latter-day Technicolor Venuses as Lana Turner seemed somewhat anemic.

The Met had picked Pablo Picasso's monumental oil, The Pipes of Pan, as a contemporary example of the Greek glorification of the body. Picasso's heavy-limbed athletes had the same solidity as sculpture, and for all their blank faces and lumpish hands & feet they seemed to glow with life and health. It was a safe bet that artists a century from now would still be learning from the Greeks.

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