Athens-Sparta January 23, 2007

Athens-Sparta, an exhibition of rare archaeological artifacts and works of art from Athens and Sparta, Greece, opened at the Onassis Cultural Center in New York City on December 6, 2006. Highlights of the exhibition include treasures such as a marble statue of a hoplite, known as "Leonidas", from the end of the 5th century B.C.; a marble statue of an Athenian Kore from the Acropolis Museum, from the 5th century B.C.; bronze figurines of hoplites from Sparta, from the 8th to the 6th centuries B.C.; a ceramic kylix by the Arkesilas Painter from the 6th century B.C.; a marble statuette of Athena from the mid-4th century B.C.; Attic marble reliefs and grave stele from the late 5th century B.C.; and arrowheads and spearheads from Thermopylae, the famous 5th century battlefield. The 289 exquisite artifacts in the exhibition, many of which are traveling abroad for the first time, will be on view at the Onassis Cultural Center in New York through May 12, 2007.

Athens-Sparta consists of three sections representing the cultural development of the two most important city-states in ancient Greece, along with an introduction that focuses on the two cities' formations. The first section explores their artistic, social, and cultural developments from the Late Geometric period through the Archaic period (8th to the 5th centuries B.C.), including metal work, pottery, and public monuments. While Sparta was not making the same strides in monumental structures as Athens during this period, it did flourish in other areas including metal work, ivory sculpture, and pottery.

In the first half of the 6th century B.C., Sparta was one of the most important centers for artistic production, particularly for bronze works, as shown in such rare pieces as the hoplite figurines, a black-figure hydria depicting riders and warriors, from 555-550 B.C., a relief votive stele representing an enthroned couple, from 550-525 B.C., and a group of ivory figurines from the Sanctuary of Artemis Orthia from 700-650 B.C.

The two other sections in Athens-Sparta represent the artistic development during the 5th century B.C., in the broader context of the continuously changing dynamics between the two cities, during the Persian Wars (500 B.C. to 449 B.C.) and the Peloponnesian War (431 B.C. to 404 B.C.). These momentous events greatly influenced each city-state's culture and artistic development, as represented through the magnificent artifacts in the exhibition, including an Attic black-figure lekythos from 500-490 B.C., a bronze statuette of an athlete from about 500 B.C., and a Nike figurine from the late 6th century B.C.

In the 5th century B.C., Attic art made advances in the areas of sculpture and pottery which led to the popularization of these art forms, examples of which include a votive relief with the Delian Trinity and a helmeted head of Athena from the late 5th century B.C., and the silver Tetradrachm of Athens from 450-404 B.C. In contrast, there is a remarkable scarcity of excavated Laconic artifacts from this period, with scant metal work pieces and little evidence of advancements in Laconian pottery. The archaeological evidence of Laconic monumental stone sculpture from the Classical period is also considerably less than that of the Archaic period. Athens-Sparta features a rare example of stone sculpture from this period: a statue of a hoplite, known as "Leonidas", from 480-470 B.C., one of the most widely studied artifacts in the exhibition. The statue depicts a running hoplite (a heavily armored foot soldier), known as the Spartan king Leonidas, who led a small force of soldiers against the much larger Persian army in Thermopylae in 480 B.C., during the Persian Wars. Leonidas and all of the soldiers died in the battle, becoming a symbol of the Spartan willingness to sacrifice oneself for the greater good of society.

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