HISTORY OF COVER
By Nora Lucentini, Director of the State Archaelogical Museum of Ascoli Piceno
For a magazine dedicated to the sibylline region, to have chosen the handle of Belmonte with the Gentleman of the Horses as symbol means to backdate the searching field of the evasive distinction between umbrians and picens to the mythical times of the beginnings of history jumping back in time more than 2,500 years.
In fact, the establishment of the relations between the two areas can go back to the Age of Bronze, 2,000 years before Christ (b.C.). But it’s only around the beginning of the Age of the Iron, shortly after the year 1000 b.C., when their interchanges are more evident.
In this period, Ternano and Ascolano are implied in the same commercial traffic network through the diffusion of clasps, belts and other characteristic jewels; that extends to Calabria on one side and on the other side, to the other side of the sea, throughout the Balkan coast.
Later on, in the Age of the Handle, at the beginning of the 6th Century b.C., at the moment of greater expansion of the picen civilization, in the heat of the archaic age right before the opening of the Adriatic routes to the Greek commerce; most of the commerce of merchandise was transported through the passages of the Apennines “from and towards” the Etruria and the rich southern Lazio, helping the development Ascolano the main urban center is Belmonte with its 300 tombs rich in necklaces, arms and sets of dishes. Beyond the mountains, in the territory of the umbrians, between the Apennines and the Tiber, the urban centers are developed in the Ternano and the shining grounds, but the Nerina Valley becomes a corridor opened towards the north until central Europe.
It’s the era of the car tombs, of burials in great graves located under the cars of battle or stroll reserved to the princess and to their women. In Monteleone of Spoleto a “Leader” is buried under one bronze beam entirely decorated with scenes of battles dominated by a Gorgon’s head. The cars of the “Leader” of Belmonte are of simple wood finished in bronze, but in its tomb there are piled up nothing less than six cars, next to a rich pile of arms and ceremonial jars among which is the handle, taken as symbol of this magazine.
This decorated great jar plated in bronze (technically called hydria, that’s to say, one water jar of Greek form, provided with two robust horizontal handles to transport it and with a vertical one to grasp it when serving); but modified through the working of the vertical handle until transforming it into an openwork filled with figures lacking of any functionality and of the symmetrical duplication transforming the jar into a species of amphora. The flow of wealth due to the traffic with the Eastern Mediterranean in the VIII and VII centuries b.C. was mainly concentrated in the south, in the Magna Greece, colonized by the Greeks, and in the Tirrenic coast. Nevertheless it’s in the 6th Century when the relations with the Greek world, established directly through the sea or through the intermediation of the Etruscans, were also intensified with respect to the population of the Adriatic slope and between the picens it became fashionable to have ceramics and exotic bronzes of ceremonies, later to deposit them in the tombs like funeral gifts. The value that was attributed to these objects was related not only to its economic equivalence but also to the exotic aura and the importance of those who gave them. In fact, they weren’t objects sold through a purely commercial circuit but reciprocal gifts within the framework of personal and political relationships in the recognition of the rank of the protagonists. The function of the object and the subject of its possible decoration with figures were therefore carefully chosen based on the addressee and, often, specifically created for him. This was the reason why Greek bronze craftsmen of Magna Greece were solicited to create Greek style set of dishes, armours and even cars modified thus to respond to the taste of the picens or umbrians clients.
It’s probable that these pieces were celebrated in the families, like the shield of Achilles described in the Iliad. So famous that its copies and imitations even acquired indirectly their prestige. The one of Belmonte is in fact a copy, the most beautiful of a nourished group of units produced by local craftsmen on the base of prototypes of Greek origin, like the one found in Treia, near Macerata, that reproduce the scheme called Despotes ippon, the Gentleman of the Horses.
The composition formed by a divinity between two submissive animals is of old Eastern origin, but in archaic Italy this particular version with the horses painted, worked or made in ceramics became so popular that makes think that it alludes to a well defined figure, loved by the Adriatic people and in central Italy; who could be Diomedes, the hero of horses venerated in Ancona, to which was attributed the foundation of numerous cities on the Adriatic coast. The handle represents, in fact, a soldier with armour that holds two horses by their mare, birds of prey, oscillating over them, are grasping a serpent (the puppies in the superior extremity aren’t part of the scene but it’s an aside decorative element): indeed, it was said about Diomedes that his tomb was protected by comrades-in-arms transformed into carnivorous birds.
The copies of this handle are concentrated in central Italy, mainly between Marche (Belmonte, Sirolo and Tolentino) and Umbria (Perugia and Foligno) testifying us a common artisan tradition and above all a shared mythological and ideological patrimony.
Other pieces, nowadays in foreign collections, suggest however the possibility that some of these have truly been gathered in the royal circles of central Europe through the circuit of goods and merchandising that was articulated in the Picen and the Valley of Nerina, such as precious furniture with amber and ivory incrustations of low quality found in Sirolo and Grafenbuhl, or the hydria, almost twin of the one of Treia, but inferior to the one of the Lady of the Fierce – a winged goddess flanked by lions – found in the tomb of a hallstatian princess in Graehwill, in Switzerland.
Precious gifts sent to favour the interchanges between so distant realities but then in contact. |
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