NEW YORK - El Greco's "The Adoration of the Magi" is the star attraction of a compact, engrossing survey of Hellenic art during four centuries of foreign occupation.
"From Byzantium to Modern Greece, Hellenic Art in Adversity" documents how competing rulers, religions, customs and traditions combined to influence the captive nation's artists and artisans - from the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 to Greek independence in 1830.
The 137 objects - icons, landscapes and portraits, ceramics, jewelry, woodcarvings, costumes, decorative embroidery - from the Benaki Museum in Athens go on display today through May 6, 2006. Admission is free at the atrium gallery of the Onassis Cultural Center.
The one-time exhibit demonstrates that competing ideas grounded in Islam of the Ottoman Empire, Roman Catholicism of the Republic of Venice and homegrown Orthodox Christianity blended and spurred artistic creativity across the Hellenic region during the nearly 400 years of division.
One example is El Greco (1541-1614), born Domenikos Theotokopoulos on the Venetian-ruled island of Crete. Before becoming the leader of the Spanish school, El Greco learned to paint in the Italian style at studios in his homeland and in Venice. His "Adoration" shows this foreign influence, yet the stamp of his originality is also apparent in work from early in his career.
Painted in 1565 in Crete, when he was 24, the egg tempera on wood suggests El Greco's emerging mannerist style, which reached full fruition at the Spanish royal court. Slightly cracked from age, this intensely spiritual scene of the Christ child, the Virgin Mary and the three wise men is rendered in somber tones with his trademark luminous sky. The human figures aren't in exact proportion, foreshadowing the elongated limbs of the religious figures in El Greco's later masterpieces from Spain.
The bulk of the objects on display are nonreligious, many with a folkloric quality, and are markedly different from the splendid marble busts, decorative pottery and grand architectural relics of ancient Greece.
"The secular art of Hellenism under foreign rule, as a counterpoint to the dire circumstances of everyday reality in those years, lauds the joy of life with an unprecedented riot of color, with marital symbolism and its attendant wish for fertility," curator Angelos Delivorrias explains in the show's catalog.
The works illustrate various themes of Greek history over the years of occupation: the battles for sovereignty in a fractured country, including a 17th-century watercolor of the Venetian bombardment of the Parthenon held by the Ottoman Turks; the growth of Greek shipping and trade, with paintings of nautical life and a late 16th-century chart of the Mediterranean Sea showing all major ports; home and decorative arts, including a complete reconstruction of a bridal bedchamber with embroidered adornments; women's costumes and jewelry from the 17th-19th centuries; Greece as a tourist attraction, depicted in drawings and paintings of English and French visitors in the 18th-19th centuries; and portraits of Greek nationalists who spurred the War of Independence.
Also featured are six icons, the oldest dating to the late 1400s, "Virgin Madre della Consolazione." From a Cretan workshop, artist unknown, the egg tempera on wood, with gold leaf, shows Mary holding Jesus, who balances a golden globe in his hand.
Delivorrias singled out as a favorite a painted map of Greece dating to 1585. The wall-sized painting depicts the Mediterranean in azure, and Greece and Asia Minor in brown and golden hues, a rugged topography dotted with mountain peaks. It is thought to be a copy of a similar map painted for the private study of Cosimo de Medici.
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