Fotos: Tocho, septiembre de 2018
la Fundación Giancarlo Ligabue de Venecia acaba de inaugurar, en el palacio veneciano de Loredan- sede de la Academia de Bellas artes y de letras-, una gran exposición sobre figurillas antropomórficas del Mediterráneo, del Valle del Indo, y de Centroasia, de los cuarto y tercer milenios, que responden a características formales parecidas: Ídolos. El poder de las imágenes.
Según la comisaria, la comisaria honoraria del Louvre, Annie Caubet, en este periodo se produjo, en esta zona tan extensa -y posiblemente en todo el mundo- una nueva manera de relacionarse con el mundo, con el más allá (el mundo de los muertos, los espíritus, los dioses -si es que éstos ya existían), a través de signos esquemáticos, ya sea pictogramas (signos gráficos), ya sea a través de grafismos (ornamentación cerámica, quizá una pre-escritura) y de estatuillas no naturalistas -en pueblos familiarizados con el naturalismo, sin embargo, lo que podría sugerir que la manera de componer dichas figuras tendería a ser una "manera" esquemática de transcribir o de fijar una visión del mundo natural o, sobre todo, sobrenatural.
La exposición incluye figuras de la Península Ibérica, Malta, Chipre, Creta, las Cícladas, Egipto prefaraónico, Levante, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Anatolia, Centro Asia y el valle del Indo, procedentes de colecciones públicas y privadas.
Algunas obras, como una cabeza sumeria de cristal de roca, son excepcionales, y son el testimonio de los intercambios culturales y comerciales entre culturas muy distintas, toda vez que dicho material no se hallaba en toda Mesopotamia.
Se incluye en esta entrada un texto del catálogo sobre los ídolos oculados (ídolos placa e ídolos cilíndricos) ibéricos:
« L´œil était dans la tombe et regardait…» (« The Eye was in the Tomb and Was Looking at…”)
Pedro Azara
(UPC-ETSAB, Barcelona)
He, She or
It is on my desk while I am writing this text. His, her or its eyes,
drilled, black and profound, are “looking” at me: eyes or whatever this sharp deep
holes are or mean. I cannot write without a certain uneasiness near He, she or
It…
He, she or
It is embodied in an incised white stone short cylinder. This may have been broken:
the cylinder may have been longer, maybe twenty centimetres high, more or less.
Is it –was
it considered- an object or an image? Is he or she a living, mortal or immortal
being? A male or female being? Can we answer to these questions? Are they
really important? Can we look and judge this item or being as people from
antiquity, related to it, she or he, did? Until the mid-fifties the answer was
clear and always the same: the item was the image of a mother goddess. Is “it”?
This small
sculpted and engraved cylinder is an Iberian “eye idol”[1]. The expression is incorrect. It belongs to a
period far before the Iberians –a collective name for different Mediterranean
cultures, a mixture of local, Greek and Phoenician traditions, from the second
half of the first millennium BC, not long before the Roman conquest-, between
the fourth and the third millennia BC. Found principally in archaeological sites
in the South of Spain, these “idols” are shape like elongated stone or marble
cylinders with engravings. Among them, drilled holes surrounded by incised rays
and sometimes circles at the head of the cylinder, and profoundly incised zigzag
horizontal or vertical lines –as if suggesting long hair in a simplified way.
Most of the “eyes” have small eyebrows over them, and sometimes curved vertical
lines on each side that frame the hypnotic gaze, due especially to the so small
and round “eyes”: it seems that they will never close.
I am using
words appropriate to name parts of a living being: eyes, eyebrows, hair;
sometimes, even arms. Ae they correct? Are they really “idols”? The “eyes” that
look like eyes of howls, and the fact that howls were the symbol of a Greek
goddess (Athena), have been a clue to interpret them as images or embodiments
of female divinities. The design of the circular eyes with rays or sun-eyes
appears also in small thin gold plaques –we can figure that the
quality of the metal may have been associated with the radiance of the sun-
deposited near the cylindrical idols. Gods and goddesses never sleep,
contrarily to human beings. So these items have been considered divine
figurines. Could they have been or could they have represented other mortal or
immortal beings?
A recent
archaeological find has brought some light to these objects. Until now, they have
been excavated without any study of the site where they have been found. The
provenance was unknown as they came from illegal or undocumented excavations. The
Museum of Huelva exhibits a stunning collection of cylindrical “idols”,
presented in well light showcase as if a minimal contemporary installation.
They were all discovered in the archaeological site of La Orden-Seminario,
located in the area of the city of Huelva. Twenty nine idols, from two tombs,
were found. They constitute the most important find in the Iberian Peninsula. Dated from the very early fourth millennium
BC, they were in a perfect state. Even if they were founded lying on the ground
–due to the fall of the vault-, it seems that they were standing and that they
were not moved. The collection may tell us about what they may have signified. These “idols” were not deposit alone. There
were not intended to be appreciated our used alone. They belong to a group.
This group was standing on a tomb. Their function and their meaning were
related to the Netherworld, whatever this was. There were not lying on the
ground, as a dead being, or an offering, but, in spite of the narrowness of the
base they were, they were standing up –as a living being? They were not alone
in the tomb. Ceramics were also deposit. So they belonged to a burial offering.
But their function was not utilitarian. They did not contain goods. They could
express the wealth of the living – their shape needed a complex and articulate
work maybe of different artisans-, or they could “looked” after the dead. In
the first case, they symbolise richness and generosity, in the second case,
they express ties between living and dead people, anguish or fear, and their
function maybe was to put in contact both the living and the dead, and to
maintain these ties. They were representing the living, as being in touch with
the dead for ever. They may be not represent any supernatural being, but the
living who were trying to be near their dead relatives –and at the same time
keeping them in the Netherworld.
The
so-called Iberian idols or figurines from the Neolithic and the Chalcolithic are
of, as in any culture, very different shapes depending on the epoch and the
location. Among them, some of the most outstanding figurines are the Chillarón
idol (Cuenca Museum), a spherical double “idol” –a male and female
semi-spherical figures united by the circular base, maybe twins or an
hermaphrodite, a sign of singularity- from the III-II millennia BC, or an “eye
idol” in the shape of a sort of tri-dimensional X –there are some others-, as a
figure with wide opened legs or as if two figures were united by the belly
(Provincial Archaeological Museum, Badajoz). These two are quite different from
“idols” found in the Mediterranean area, the Rena white marble male figurine
from the III millennium BC (Badajoz Museum) is surprisingly similar to
Sardinian figurines, even if the way the hair is incised remembers the same
representation in the Iberian cylindrical eye “idols”. Others could be compared
to similar Mediterranean figurines. The raised pointed short “arms” of
the large Artana “idol” (III millennium BC) (Archaeological Museum, Borriana)
(Fig.5), of 52 cm high, sculpted in limestone but quite eroded, are similar to
some “arms” of some of the plaque idols –about which we are going to write
now-, but the Artana figurine (if it is an ancient figurine) raises questions with no answers
yet as it had been discovered in the twenties in a Muslim cemetery, and it may
come from decoration of an Islamic building – having not been interpreted then
as a figurine but as an abstract motif, maybe a sort of sacred stone.
These cylindrical idols do look quite
different from other Mediterranean figurines. Another type, the called grey
plaque-idols, made of slate, may be more familia, but they constitute
a large group of almost two thousand figurines –if there are figurines- found
all in the south of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal). What are they
and what do they represent, if we can find an answer?
The plaque
idols, also from the third millennium BC, found, as the cylindrical figurines,
in some sites in the south of the Peninsula, have traditionally been
interpreted as divine images: images of a mother goddess, the same protective
and pacific Mediterranean goddess supposedly followed by all pre-historic
cultures. This conventional interpretation may or must be questioned for
different reasons. The first one is that not all plaques have anthropomorphic
features at all (features that are drilled or incised eyes and sometimes
eyebrows and sculpted raised arms on both sides of the plaque. Incised “eyes”
and one or two drilled holes at the “top” can cohabitate, suggesting that, when
edges are worn-out, the plaque may have been used or reused as a pendant). So
they may not even be anthropomorphic figurines at all. Except for some larger
plaques (as in the Archaeological Museum in Sevilla), most have a similar size.
They fit in a hand. They can be hold (as a blade or a flint, for instance). The
plaques are always covered with incised geometric patterns: triangles
–interpreted as prominent vaginas, which is a strange lecture as these
triangles are incised on the whole body of the item-, squares, vertical,
horizontal or curved lines. Sometimes, horizontal lines divide the plaque in
two, suggesting an articulate anthropomorphic body. Most of the time adapted to the trapeze shape
(with round corners), a shape vaguely evocative of a flint stone. The motifs do
not seem to be representative. They are not or they cannot associated with any
anthropomorphic feature.
However the
patterns are similar to textile ones. Do they represent clothes? Textile patters were not just decorative.
They were ways of register important data for the life of a community. They
were a sort of “pre-writing”. They may have measure the passing of time. And
they surely constitute identification symbols of a group. In spite of the so
different needed work between incising plaques and weaving wool strings, these
functions could be the same in both works. Plaques and textiles could be signs:
they could embodied values shared by a group made of living and dead beings,
ancestors and human beings, values fixed in signs and transferred from one
generation to others. As these plaques have been found in funerary contexts,
the buried dead could be considered still part of a community. So these signs
could even be considered as heraldic motifs, as professor Katina L. Lillios has
suggested[2].
They could have been identifying signs and at the same time registers of past
events or of the passing of events. In any case, they could represent a
protective divinity (as they have been conventionally be interpreted during
years), but these want would be important is that these possible figurines
would have acted as transmitters of values –expressed through graphic motifs
that could be easily recognised as belonging to a group- in order to narrow
ties between past and present members of a community along time.
Protective
figures? Surely: they wold have preserved the memory of a community, being
testimony of the legacy and validity of shared values. For these possible
reasons they were far more important than just “divinities”.
[1] The best collections of prehistoric
Iberian “idols” (cylindrical and plaque idols, of different sizes) are in the
Archaeological Museums of the Spanish cities of Sevilla –maybe the best- (Fig.3),
Huelva, Badajoz and Madrid, and in Portuguese museums (Museu Nacional de
Arqueologia e Etnologia, Lisbon, Museo Lapidar Infante D. Henrique, Faro)
[2] LILLIOS, T. Katina: Heraldry for the Dead. Memory, Identity, and
the Engraved Stone Plaques of Neolithic Iberia. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2008
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