Unearthing the Glory of a Once-Proud City

In April, Moscow’s Pushkin Museum unveiled its long-sequestered cache of ancient gold artifacts once thought to have come from the fabled city of Troy. The hoard had been excavated in the late 19th century by the great German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann.

During the chaotic final days of battle in Europe at the end of World War II, however, the gold rings, goblets, pendants and coins were taken by the Red Army from a bunker near the Berlin Zoo--where the collection had been hidden for safekeeping from the obliterating power of Allied bombs--and spirited to the Russian capital. The Moscow exhibition is the latest in a growing series of controversial shows of so-called trophy art, booty captured as a prize by conquering armies at war’s end.

Now, at the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums’ California Palace of the Legion of Honor, a small, keenly observed and highly important exhibition focuses on another body of art whose story is somewhat similar, but with one notable difference. These great works of antiquity were also captured as trophy art during World War II, although their particular tale took a fateful turn that no one could have imagined.

A group of ancient marble relief sculptures, dating from around 180-156 BC, were also in that bunker near the Berlin Zoo in 1945. Like Schliemann’s gold, the sculptures had been excavated in modern-day Turkey by a remarkable German archeologist.

In three campaigns between 1864 and 1886, Carl Humann excavated the citadel of the ancient city of Pergamon, one of the smaller kingdoms established in the struggles for succession after the death of Alexander the Great, the unparalleled empire builder. Pergamon had never been a “lost city,” the way Troy was when Schliemann used Homer’s Iliad as a kind of poetic map to try to find the epic place. But Pergamon’s monumental altar to the Hellenistic deities was certainly a legendary work of art, whose rediscovery by Humann is among the great moments in modern archeology.

In the first dig alone, Humann unearthed 94 panels of the now-famous Gigantomachy frieze, whose monumental baroque depiction of a ferocious battle between Olympian gods and earthly giants encircled the exterior podium of the huge Pergamon Altar. As if that were not enough, he also found 35 panels of the less well-known Telephos frieze, which tells in detail the legend of the kingdom’s founding and ringed the inner court around the altar’s sacrificial table, together with several thousand fragments of both friezes, almost all of the main cornice of the building that housed them, and assorted single statues, busts, carved horses and other bits and pieces.

Over the next two decades, the archeologist found even more.

Humann secured his astonishing finds for his sponsor, the Berlin Museum, through a series of apparently sound trade and purchase agreements with the Turkish sultan. A reconstruction of the Great Altar at Pergamon, including the sculptures and architectural fragments, was set up in Germany in a new building designed expressly for that purpose.

So significant was this late Hellenistic masterpiece that the Berlin structure, which also housed various antique sculptures and architectural fragments from other sites, came to be known as the Pergamon Museum. Had the precious pieces not been carefully packed up and secreted during World War II, the Allied incendiary bombs that brought down the museum’s roof and blew out all its doors and windows would surely have reduced the Pergamon antiquities to a modern pile of marble dust.

In the bunker, though, the salvaged treasure was subject to other hazards of war, including confiscation by the victorious Red Army when it swept into Berlin.

Together with Schliemann’s gold and countless paintings, manuscripts and other artistic treasures, the pieces of the Pergamon Altar were loaded onto trains and sent east, eventually winding up in the storage rooms of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The captive art was a portion of an immense artistic trophy held in partial retribution for unspeakable Nazi atrocities against the Russian people.

The sculptures remained in Russia until 1958. Partly to establish a symbol of cultural authority in Communist Eastern Europe, they were returned that year to the Pergamon Museum--which by then was located behind the iron curtain in East Berlin.

But in one of the great ironies of geopolitical wrangling over cultural booty, the great Pergamon Altar slipped silently back into German hands in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and Germany was reunified. Unlike Schliemann’s gold or the contested Impressionist and Postimpressionist paintings shown with such fanfare in St. Petersburg last year, there would be no fight over the rightful ownership of these astonishing carvings.

We may never see Schliemann’s gold or the Hermitage’s contested French paintings on temporary display in an American museum, given the bitter arguments over who their legal owners are. While no such clouds obscure the Pergamon sculptures, to see the 12 spectacular panels of the Telephos frieze beautifully laid out in the Legion’s elegantly sky-lit Rosekrans Court is still enough to make you blink your eyes in disbelief.

Organized by Legion curator Renee Dreyfus in cooperation with the Berlin Museum and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, its only other venue, the show is a landmark, since never before have Pergamon treasures been seen in the United States. “Pergamon: The Telephos Frieze From the Great Altar” is a small, concise presentation focusing on the most well-preserved relief panels from the remarkably beautiful marble frieze.

The Telephos frieze occupies a special place in the history of Western sculpture: It’s the earliest extant example of a continuous narrative. The story of the birth, life and triumph of Pergamon’s founder, Telephos, unfolds through time and space to create an epic visual poem of patriotic importance to the city.

Prior examples of continuous narrative art are thought to have existed--most notably, a suite of 12 groups of bronzes depicting the entire sequence of Herakles’ Labors by the incomparable 4th century BC sculptor Lyssipos. But none has ever been found.

Newly cleaned and conserved, the 12 panels at the Legion represent slightly less than one-quarter of the relief (the remaining fragments are too fragile to travel from Berlin). Telephos’ full story is thus not to be seen. But enough episodes are on view, and with enough range of jaw-dropping artistic skill on the part of the unidentified sculptor, to make plain the dazzling quality of the relief.

To underscore the difference between the apparently new device of continuous narrative, which wouldn’t become commonplace until the rise of the Roman Empire, and traditional Greek ensembles of sculpture that focus on a single event, the show includes a group of three carvings also found at Pergamon. Herakles’ release of Prometheus from bondage is the event depicted by the magnificently carved, 2-foot-tall sculptures.

At the left, a sensuously reclining personification of the Caucasus mountains watches at the exact moment Herakles releases his arrow from his bow, to shoot the eagle perched on Prometheus’ knee (the sculptural eagle is now lost). Prometheus, of course, had been chained to a rock by Zeus for having had the audacity to bring fire from the heavens to mortal man; each day Zeus’ eagle would tear Prometheus’ liver from his writhing body, and each night the liver would grow back.

The unknown artist has selected the peak moment of a dramatic event, when the mortal son of Zeus undermines his Olympian father to aid humankind. Like the tumultuous battle between gods and giants in the Gigantomachy frieze, several small fragments of which are also included in the show, the Prometheus group distills the story to a moment of high theatrical impact.

Episodes in the Telephos frieze do, too. One of the most remarkable is also a fragment of a battle scene, in which two warriors fall to the ground on top of a collapsed horse. The sculptor has compressed a huge amount of visual information into a few square feet, while capturing the forceful movement of crashing bodies and the chaotic fury of war. The left-hand figure falls head down, the right-hand figure falls back against him and on top of the horse’s head, which is pressed into the ground. From the right an arm enters the scene to grab the shield of one fallen warrior.

Still, the dramatic moments of the Telephos frieze are very different from the Prometheus group. Its scenes are put into the larger context of its hero’s life--which also means within a larger visual context that locates figures in an illusionistic landscape or interior space, as well as in a larger expressive context that runs the gamut of emotional possibilities.

You also come to places where figures are suddenly placed back-to-back. This handy visual shorthand for a change of scene and a new episode in the unfolding story is akin to a modern cinematic cut.

The frieze also would have been painted, not left in the unadorned and pinkish marble we now see, and the painting would have heightened the illusionistic power of the narrative. As the very good catalog accompanying the show explains, the artist harnessed all his considerable powers to make his epic visual poem of Telephos’ life as convincingly real as possible to its audience.

Why the forceful urge to persuade? The Great Altar is a critically important propaganda machine. As a relatively new kingdom, Pergamon was determined to establish its power and authority, and tracing its founding to the story of Telephos, son of Herakles, was one way to accomplish that. Such glorious ancestry gave the kingdom an origin in divinity.

Of course, it also gave the Pergamon kings the authority to rule. For, aside from the specific events of its narrative, the Telephos frieze is also a sophisticated declaration of the divine right of kings, uttered with artistic eloquence long before the Christian era. Together with the monumental Gigantomachy frieze, in which the gods are victorious in their struggle with earthly tyrants, it helped establish a mixed legacy of divine rulers handed down from Alexander the Great.

Not a bad lineage for a flowering dynasty to proclaim.

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“PERGAMON: THE TELEPHOS FRIEZE FROM THE GREAT ALTAR,” California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 34th Avenue and Clement Street, San Francisco. Dates: Tuesdays to Sundays, 10 a.m. to 4:45 p.m., through Sept. 8. Price: adults, $7; youths, $4. Phone: (415) 863-3330.