Context 163 - March 2020

60 C O N T E X T 1 6 3 : M A R C H 2 0 2 0 In Paris’s sandals Once I was showing some people the refinements of a Georgian house. At a rather nice marble fireplace with sculpted scenes, I waxed lyrical about the Age of Enlightenment and its fascination with classical themes. I referred, particularly, on the left-hand side, to the labours of Heracles and a most fearsome Nemean Lion, with which our hero was apparently engaged in some pretty strenuous dentistry; only to be faced, on the right-hand side, with Samson bringing down the Temple of Dagon on the heads of his in-laws and sundry other Philistines. Lesson learned: be careful of your own pre- conceived ideas! That lesson came to mind in two superb recent London exhibitions: Gauguin Portraits at the National Gallery andTroy: Myth and Reality at the British Museum. The TrojanWars date from a time when deities dabbled irresponsibly and abusively in human lives, women were either objectivised beauties or malign schemers, and men were dashing and heroic but with distinctly iffy relationships with women. Among these men was Paris, the over-entitled prince of Troy. In a corrupt beauty contest in which all three contestants offer bribes, he wins the beauteous wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta, who was Aphrodite’s bribe, and whisks her off to Troy; and Aphrodite wins the Golden Apple, which had been stolen by Heracles. Menelaus is somewhat dischuffed so, when Helen texts him ‘get me outta here’, he asks Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, to call up the Association of Achaean Kings and organise an international rescue effort. The rest is history, as any 19th-century, classically educated, buccaneer archaeologist would know, not least Heinrich Schliemann. In 1871 Schliemann, in full confidence that Homer’s Iliad was a reliable historical record, dug rapidly and destructively through seven ‘layers’ of Troy until he found, at ‘Troy II’, signs of a city destroyed, declared it to be the city of King Priam and asserted that the westward-facing gate was the ‘Scaean Gate’, the one through which the Trojans had hauled the wooden horse.Which it wasn’t. Proper archaeology showed that Troy II was a good millennium earlier than the 1200 BCE date for any plausible historical setting of the Iliad . Priam’s city, if any, is Troy VIIa. Gauguin also had a pretty cavalier attitude to women. Unlike Paris, faced with the ‘Three Graces’ he might well have plumped for Athene, whose bribe was wisdom, as self-knowledge and avoidance of preconceptions were obsessions for him. He had a massive downer on convention: French society, traditional Beaux Arts painting, impressionism. He painted only what he saw, and what he saw needed to be unaffectedly natural. He tried Brittany but found Parisian influence already creeping in there. So, recalling the native cultures of his childhood in Peru, he sought a primitive idyll in Tahiti, about as far away from Paris as he could think of. But even there he found the stultifying, moralistic repression of French Catholic missionaries already supplanting Polynesian culture. Gauguin’s need for his portraits to be as much about him as the sitter became a post-impressionist meme: synthetism. It resulted in some of his subjects disliking their portraits and even hiding them. He increasingly included symbolic objects, displacing the sitter to the edges of the composition, and eventually sometimes even omitted the sitter altogether. In the world of culture, we should avoid personal preconceptions, but our own experiences and personalities need a teensy look in – or life would be a terrible drag. It’s hard to do. Gauguin paradoxically had a preconception about the avoidance of preconception. And Schliemann blew it completely.We need to steer a middle course. I know what you’re thinking. The idea that all the richness of womanhood can be thirded and assigned to three alluring personifications is both naïf and naff. Nevertheless, in Paris’s sandals, I think I might just have gone for Hera, goddess of motherhood, home and hearth; and vindictive stepmother of Heracles, who caused me such personal embarrassment. Her bribe? King of Europe and Asia? Perhaps not, then! James Caird Amphorae depiciting scenes from the Trojan War, National Museum of Antiquities (Photo: Rob Koopman, Wikimedia)