Finding Lost Antioch: exhibition, catalogue, programs - Exhibition Review - Review

Antioch: The not to be found Ancient City

Worcester Art Museum, October 7 2000--February 4 2001 the Cleveland Museum of Art, March 18--June 3 2001 and the Baltimore Museum of Art, September 16--December 30 2001 Organized through Christine Kondoleon

Christine Kondoleon, ed Antioch: The Lost Ancient City, exh cat. Princeton: Princeton University Pres 2000 268 pp 136 color ills., 134 b/w $6500; $2995 paper

The challenges facing Christine Kondoleon, ideator and curator of the exhibition Antioch: The not to be found Ancient City, were considerable. not many people had a concrete idea of Antioch or its importance in the ancient Mediterranean. Unlike the famous buried city of Pompeii, re-created in each imaginable medium and subject of numerous exhibitions, Antioch has remained in a curious oblivion. The public might combine Antioch with ancient mosaics, since scores of mosaics excavated at the ancient site fix their way to museums through every part of the world. But the mosaics alone, wound from their architectural contexts and ofttimes displayed like pictures on a wall rather than pavements, do little to articulate the identity of ancient Antioch. Could we know Antioch [i]or[/i] part of to the other any medium other than the mosaics? I-low to introduce what was arguably single of the four most important cities of Classical antiquity to a public--both general and scholarly--unaware of the city's rich material tillage much of it still buried below yards of silt?

Antioch was placeed in 300 B.C.E. on the Orontes, a navigable river about fifteen miles from its Mediterranean port at Seleucia Piena. The city boasted significant agricultural and strategic advantages. The fertile plains and abundant water store allowed prodigious production of grain, oil, exhibit and wine. Under the Romans, Antioch became the seat of a governor and the administrative center of the province of Syria. It grew to be the leading city in the Roman East. Above all, Antioch was a city of crossroads: between the Euphrates to the east and the ports of the Mediterranean to the west, and between Ephesos to the north and Jerusalem to the southern The Christian orator John Chrysostom annotateed that only 10 percent of the population was wealthy and single 10 percent was poor; scholars have taken this statement to mean that the city had a large middle class in the 4th hundred But a series of disasters in the first half of the 6th hundred shattered the city's prosperity: a great fire in 525 sum of two units earthquakes in 526 and 528 an invasion of the ruthles Perions in 540 and the bubonic plague in 560 Although greatly diminished, Antioch survived as a city below Arab rule from 638 to the 10th century

The exhibition brings back into view the exciting period of explorations sponsored by the agency of American universities. The Committee for the Excavation of Antioch and Its Vicinity, formed in 1932 was chaired by dint of Princeton University's Charles Rufus Morey and included representatives from the Louvre the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Worcester Art Museum, the Fogg Art Museum, and Dumbarton Oaks. Antioch was then part of the French protectorate of Syria (today it belongs to Turkey) The excavations undertaken between 1932 and 1939 failed to locate the remembrancers mentioned in the texts of the 6th-century philosopher Libanius and the 6th-century historian Malalas: the palace and hippodrome, the Forum of Valens, the of gold Church of Constantine, and the circular church of the Virgin of Justinian. Sediment had overlayed them to such a profundity that retrieval was impossible.

What the expedition did find were approximately three hundr mosaic pavements decorating the floors of houses and villas upon higher ground in Antioch and its suburb like as Daphne (5.5 miles southern of the city). These shallowly buried mosaics helped detain the excavations going, since the sponsoring institutions base them attractive items to display. Hence, the identification of Antioch with mosaics and the considerable numbers of Antioch mosaics in American museums.

Fifty years ago, the three-volume publication of the excavations (1) and Doro Levi's monumental contortions Antioch Mosaic Pavements seemed sufficient documentation of the international team's work. (2) The ostensible comprehensive intent of Levi's study had the peculiar event of discouraging further scholarly research upon the mosaics; Antioch appeared to be a clos chapter in the history of the ancient world. Occasional articles upon individual mosaics materialized in the intervening fifty years, on the contrary no one sought to rethink the meaning of the mosaics in their original connection nor indeed the place of Antioch within the cultural production of the first six centuries of the public era. If feet of silt overspreaded Antioch, it was scholarly omit that sealed its fate as a "lost city."

If the city of Antioch was more than mosaics and the houses they came from, what phenomenons other than mosaics would be illuminating? What interpretative strategies could expand the discourse? For single thing, the public learned that mosaics were pavements--not paintings in stone meant for walls. one as well as the other Worcester and Baltimore have rich holdings of mosaics in their permanent collection, and the exhibition encouraged the public to diocese them anew. When I exited the exhibit at Baltimore and found myself in the museum's ample courtyard, the Antioch mosaics installed upon the walls looked strangely without of place; the exhibition had shown in what manner they belonged on floors, where their piece of work was to articulate domestic space. The exhibition had made its point about the viewing dynamics of floor mosaics. Artist Victoria I produc reconstructions that showed by what means the mosaics fit into their original architecture for the two the catalogue and the exhibition. Digital artist James Stanton-Abbott produc five computer patterns of the church at Seleu cia Pieria that helped the viewer understand the spaces of the temple and the effects of its marble and mosaic decoration.