August 29, 2006

PRECIOUS ANCIENT JEWELRY SHARES ITS GOLDEN LEGACY

SAN BERNARDINO , Calif. - Exquisite gold chains and carved gems from the ancient Greek world, multicolored bead necklaces from the Roman Empire and gold belt buckles from Byzantium are among the three-hundred fifty precious objects going on exhibit Sept. 21 in the Robert V. Fullerton Art Museum at Cal State San Bernardino.

"Golden Legacy: Ancient Jewelry from the Burton Y. Berry Collection" is presented by the Indiana University Art Museum in Bloomington and organized by the museum curator, Adriana Calinescu.

"Golden Legacy" celebrates the ingenuity, technical skill, and artistic achievements of ancient gold- and silversmiths, says Calinescu. The show reveals the "underlying conceptual inspirations that bore upon the creation of jewelry artifacts and explores their functions in the lives of ancient owners."

The exhibit also pays tribute to the legacy of the collector, the Honorable Burton Y. Berry (1901-1985) -- a native son of Indiana , who spent much of his adult life serving as a diplomat in the eastern Mediterranean . Berry 's collection comprises close to 4,000 jewelry artifacts and 1,000 carved gemstones, out of which about 350 will be on display at the Cal State San Bernardino museum.

"The collector truly admired the precious objects of the ancient world for being as authentic an expression of art as any large-scale sculpture or temple," Calinescu says.

With examples of ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Migration, and Islamic jewelry encompassing more than 4,000 years of history, the exhibition illuminates a rather rarely explored facet of the ancient world.

Gold jewelry shares with sculpture, architecture and ceramics many decorative principles and articulations, rhythms and meanings, as well as subject matter. The variety of mythological and religious topics represented on the jewelry in the exhibition expresses the world of ideas from which the jewelry's owners chose and with whose images they lived every day. From the filigree floral scrolls on necklaces, earrings and diadems, which reflect on the cycle of life to the peacocks symbolizing eternal life on Byzantine earrings worked in opus interrasile (openwork), the viewer is constantly reminded of the richness of beliefs held by the ancients.

The exhibition offers a balanced representation of masterpieces - singular examples of the goldsmith's art, rich in design and refined in execution - and "people's jewelry," as the collector liked to call it. The latter, noted Burton Berry in "Near Eastern Excursions," one of his books of memoirs, "had an appeal to me because they were of the people, not of the state, nor of the king, nor of God." More than half of the exhibition includes jewelry sets comprising necklaces, earrings, bracelets, and finger rings, matched in motifs and proportioned in scale. Other objects of adornment are diadems and wreaths, buckles, torques, clasps and pins for garments, and funerary jewelry.

The earliest objects on view are adornments from the late fourth to third millennia B.C. in the Near East . A crescent-shaped pectoral of sheet gold with repoussé patterns (punched from behind) was probably a symbol of prestige associated with status, wealth, and power. The many gold pendants of anthropomorphic shape are pictograms, perhaps of a deity, bestowed with protective powers.

The mystical value of much of ancient jewelry is evident throughout the ages. A Hellenistic gold and garnet necklace from the second to first centuries B.C. strings a variety of amulets, among which are a "Herakles knot," a symbol of strength in love; a horseshoe talisman as a lucky charm; and a "fica" hand pendant, in the shape of a fist with thumb between first and second fingers, which was a graphic magical conjurer of sexual power.

The free exhibit runs Sept. 23-Dec. 9. A reception will be held Sept. 30 from 4:30-7 p.m. in the Robert V. Fullerton Art Museum, which is located on the east end of the CSUSB Visual Arts Building, next to parking lot M. Parking is $4 per vehicle in lots M, A, B and L. The museum is open Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m., Thursday 10 a.m. - 7 p.m., Friday and Saturday 10 a.m. - 5 p.m., and is closed Sunday and Monday. For more museum information, call (909) 537-7373.

For more information contact Eva Kirsch, museum director at (909) 537-5493.

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