Alliance for Beauty

It seemed to the playwright Seneca that with every passing year the women of Rome were becoming more and more vain, their earrings and other jewelry more and more costly. "Probably," said Seneca, "these mad fools of women believe their husbands would not be sufficiently tormented were they not to wear two or three chunks of the hereditary patrimony hanging from each ear." The women doubtless deserved the scolding, but their excess of vanity has proved a boon for posterity. For the past few months, thousands of Italians have been delighting in an exhibition of 1,000 Italian gold and silver art objects spanning the centuries from 1000 B.C. to A.D. 900.

Professor Carlo Carducci, superintendent of antiquities for Piedmont, got the idea for the show seven years ago. He and three colleagues scoured 35 museums for objects that would "highlight one of the most remarkable and least known aspects of Italian art and civilization." The show opened in Turin, went on to Bari and Naples, was on view last week in the Palazzo Reale of Milan. Its next scheduled stops: Zurich in April. Warsaw in June.

Motifs from Egypt. The earliest items in the exhibition came from the tombs of the Etruscan aristocracy. At first Etruscan artisans borrowed heavily from the Phoenicians, who in turn had taken their art motifs--typically the sphinx--from ancient Egypt. The Phoenicians favored storytelling art, but the Etruscans shed narrative for simple beauty. The gold cup (see color) celebrates no victory, tells of no heroic deeds. Decorated only by intricate little sphinxes, the cup delights the eye with its untainted lines.

In the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C., some of the finest artisans were to be found in the south, especially around Taranto, the last of the great Greek western colonies. Never before had craftsmen worked with such ingenuity or achieved greater elegance: earlier ornaments like the amber head, made 2,500 years ago (the color caption is in error), had a rather childlike innocence. The blue bronze hands may have been used to decorate some sort of handle; whatever their secret, they remain one artisan's lasting tribute to feminine grace. Of all the collections in the Taranto region, the richest was found in the tomb of a girl who died in Canosa. Among the objects was a jewel case on the cover of which was a silver disk showing a soft-fleshed Nereid.

Taste Surrendered. From the workshops of Rome came a shower of rings, earrings, necklaces, brooches, buckles and tiny busts. When the capital of the empire moved to Constantinople, its jewelry became garish and showy; and when the barbarians swept away the glory that was Rome, taste made its final surrender to superficial glitter. In the 1,000 objects in the Milan show, vanity and art started out as allies, ended as enemies. But rarely has the jeweler's hand produced objects of such intimate charm as it did when the alliance was in full flower.

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