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Finding Lost Antioch: exhibition, catalogue, programs
Art Bulletin, The, March, 2003
Antioch: The Lost 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 by Christine Kondoleon
Christine Kondoleon, ed. Antioch: The Lost Ancient City, exh. cat. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 268 pp., 136 color ills., 134 b/w. $65.00; $29.95 paper
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The challenges facing Christine Kondoleon, ideator and curator of the exhibition Antioch: The Lost Ancient City, were considerable. Few people had a concrete idea of Antioch or its importance in the ancient Mediterranean. Unlike the famous buried city of Pompeii, re-created in every imaginable medium and subject of numerous exhibitions, Antioch has remained in a curious oblivion. The public might connect Antioch with ancient mosaics, since scores of mosaics excavated at the ancient site found their way to museums throughout the world. But the mosaics alone, cut from their architectural contexts and often displayed like pictures on a wall rather than pavements, do little to articulate the identity of ancient Antioch. Could we know Antioch through any medium other than the mosaics? I-low to introduce what was arguably one of the four most important cities of Classical antiquity to a public--both general and scholarly--unaware of the city's rich material culture, much of it still buried under yards of silt?
Antioch was founded 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 supply allowed prodigious production of grain, oil, produce, 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 south. The Christian orator John Chrysostom commented that only 10 percent of the population was wealthy and only 10 percent was poor; scholars have taken this statement to mean that the city had a large middle class in the 4th century. But a series of disasters in the first half of the 6th century shattered the city's prosperity: a great fire in 525, two earthquakes in 526 and 528, an invasion of the ruthless Perions in 540, and the bubonic plague in 560. Although greatly diminished, Antioch survived as a city under Arab rule from 638 to the 10th century.
The exhibition brings back into view the exciting period of explorations sponsored by American universities. The Committee for the Excavation of Antioch and Its Vicinity, formed in 1932, was chaired by 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 monuments 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 Golden Church of Constantine, and the round church of the Virgin of Justinian. Sediment had covered them to such a depth that retrieval was impossible.
What the expedition did find were approximately three hundred mosaic pavements decorating the floors of houses and villas on higher ground in Antioch and its suburbs, such as Daphne (5.5 miles south of the city). These shallowly buried mosaics helped keep the excavations going, since the sponsoring institutions found 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 volumes Antioch Mosaic Pavements seemed sufficient documentation of the international team's work. (2) The ostensible comprehensive scope of Levi's study had the peculiar effect of discouraging further scholarly research on the mosaics; Antioch appeared to be a closed chapter in the history of the ancient world. Occasional articles on individual mosaics materialized in the intervening fifty years, but no one sought to rethink the meaning of the mosaics in their original context, nor indeed the place of Antioch within the cultural production of the first six centuries of the common era. If feet of silt covered Antioch, it was scholarly neglect that sealed its fate as a "lost city."
If the city of Antioch was more than mosaics and the houses they came from, what objects other than mosaics would be illuminating? What interpretative strategies could expand the discourse? For one thing, the public learned that mosaics were pavements--not paintings in stone meant for walls. Both Worcester and Baltimore have rich holdings of mosaics in their permanent collection, and the exhibition encouraged the public to see them anew. When I exited the show at Baltimore and found myself in the museum's ample courtyard, the Antioch mosaics installed on the walls looked strangely out of place; the exhibition had shown how they belonged on floors, where their job was to articulate domestic space. The exhibition had made its point about the viewing dynamics of floor mosaics. Artist Victoria I produced reconstructions that showed how the mosaics fit into their original architecture for both the catalogue and the exhibition. Digital artist James Stanton-Abbott produced five computer models of the church at Seleu cia Pieria that helped the viewer understand the spaces of the church and the effects of its marble and mosaic decoration.
