Idols

Since prehistoric times man has felt the need to represent the human figure, with graffiti and wall paintings but also in three-dimensional form.

From those very distant times, since the Paleolithic age, we have received an immense quantity of statuettes made of different materials reproducing human traits. What was their meaning – symbolic, religious or testimonial value, expression of metaphysical concepts, ritual or “political” function – and which subjects they really represented, still remains a mystery.

 

The exhibition “Idols, The Power of the Image” (from the Greek eídolon, image) – promoted by the Giancarlo Ligabue Foundation and curated by Annie Caubet, honorary curator of the Musée du Louvre – proposes a fascinating journey through time and space: the first attempt to compare works depicting the human body from the East to the West, from 4000 to 2000 BC.

Through 100 extraordinary finds – some of them are exceptional for their historical and scientific importance and rarity – and thanks to an involving didactic apparatus, it is possible to cover a wide geographical area, which extends from the Iberian Peninsula to the Indus Valley, from the Atlantic gates to the remote borders of the Far East, in an age of great transition, in which the villages of the Neolithic gradually evolved into the urban societies of the Bronze Age.

 

Fourteen of the objects on display belong to the Ligabue Collection, the others come from international private collections and important European museums: the Archäologische Sammlung der Universität Zürich, the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology – University of Oxford, the Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Historie in Brussels, the Armenian Mechitarist Congregation of the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni in Venice, the Badisches Landesmuseum in Karlsruhe, the MAN-Museo Arqueológico Nacional in Madrid, the Polo Museale della Sardegna – Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Cagliari, the Musei Civici di Padova – Museo Archeologico, the Department of Antiquities Cyprus in Nicosia and the Musée d’Archéologie Nationale et Domaine National de Saint-Germain-en-Laye.