“Greek Gold: Jewelry of the Classical World” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
December 2, 1994–March 4, 1995
Gold was the most appropriate material for statues of the gods in antiquity, according to Pliny, because its ethereal cast, radiant and incorruptible, was like that of divine flesh. Many bronze sculptures of gods were covered with it in the Classical period; Hellenistic rulers, having learned the power of images from Alexander the Great, often had their own portraits gilded for glory, and so did the Roman emperors.
Gold, chrysos in Greek, was highly refined in antiquity, commonly used almost entirely purified of its natural silver and copper components, in a state roughly equivalent to our modern twenty-two-carat standard. (A gold coin was divided into twenty-four keratia in Byzantine times.) Portable, gold was an important part of private wealth. In the form of coins, it was hoarded; in the form of jewelry, it was worn. Even the wreaths of fluttering gold oak, olive, or myrtle leaves, quintessential honorifics for the dead or gifts for the gods, whose images were often bedecked with them, may have been worn ceremonially at times by living mortals.
The diaspora of Athenian craftsmen at the end of the Peloponnesian War, and the probable emigration of goldsmiths from all over the Mediterranean throughout the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.to centers where gold was plentiful, encouraged a common language of designs in Classical Greek jewelry. Styles reveal a distinctive simplicity and elegance