Introduction

The immensity of the Hellenic world, from prehistoric shadows to contemporary global focus, is merely suggested by the few objects chosen for this exhibition. The manuscripts, books, prints, and photographs shown here, drawn from throughout the collections of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, are meant to serve as reflections of enduring contributions from Greece to the larger world in religious belief, poetry, drama, history, philosophy, science, architecture, and art, and in shaping the broad outlines of civilization over the enormous span of centuries.

The exhibition begins with books of faith: two manuscripts of the Gospels copied in Greek and illuminated in late Byzantine styles, and an elaborately bound edition of the Gospels, intended as a gift for a high dignitary of the Greek Orthodox Church. Next, to represent the recovery of Hellenic culture in the West, comes Aesop’s Fables, the most widely disseminated moral lessons for children and adults, in a lavishly illustrated Florentine Renaissance manuscript, in Greek, perhaps commissioned by Lorenzo de' Medici for the use of his son Piero.

Other manuscripts on view include a Latin translation of the Geographia by Ptolemy, the second-century Egyptian astronomer and geographer of Greek descent, in a Florentine copy containing twenty-seven brilliantly colored, large-scale maps of the known world; and a monumental Arabic translation of the first-century Greek physician Dioscorides’ De materia medica (Fi Hayula al-tibb), with its hundreds of painted illustrations of plants and animals and descriptions of their medicinal properties.

Aldus Manutius (ca. 1452–1515), famed Venetian publisher of ancient classics, is represented by his editio princeps (first printed edition in the original language) of Aristotle’s Opera omnia, the first major prose text printed in the original Greek, issued in five volumes between 1495 and 1498. Other first editions include the first printed Homer (Florence, 1488/9) and Plato (1513).

The ancient Hellenic legacy, as well as modern-era Greece itself, continues to inspire creativity worldwide, as witnessed by the diversity of the contemporary works on display: Georges Braque’s exquisite artist’s book Théogonie (1955), with text in Greek retelling the myths of the gods by the epic poet Hesiod; Jim Dine’s etched Head of Homer, from Neil Curry’s The Bending of the Bow: A Version of the Closing Books of Homer's Odyssey (1993); Greek artist Jannis Kounellis’s untitled photolithograph (1973), with an inscription alluding to a passage in Homer’s Iliad; and Kiki Smith’s The Vitreous Body (2001), a progression of images relating to the structure of the human eye, linked to a line of text by the sixth-century B.C.E. pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides of Elea.

Robert Rainwater
Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Chief Librarian of Art, Prints and Photographs, and Curator of the Spencer Collection

This exhibition is part of the Library’s Hellenic Festival, made possible by a generous grant from the Stavros S. Niarchos Foundation.

Support for The New York Public Library’s Exhibitions Program has been provided by Pinewood Foundation and by Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III.

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