This year's Olympics may have come and gone, but as the recent excitement over the Red Sox has shown, sports remain an integral part of our society. With the buildup to the World Series just beginning, one of the new temporary exhibits at the Museum of Fine Arts remains as relevant as ever.
"Games for the Gods: The Greek Athlete and the Olympic Spirit," a special collection brought to the Boston museum this summer, honors the 2004 Olympic Games and their return to Greece. The involved look that the exhibit takes into the world of athletics provides an interesting take on the origins of sports in general.
The collection consists of over 180 pieces, all of which relate in some way to the Olympic Games or to sports in general. Most of the objects were selected from the Museum's regular Greek and Roman collections, but a select few had yet to be displayed in Boston prior to the "Games for the Gods" exhibit, and all of them pay tribute to the image of the athlete that is still so very present in our society today.
The exhibit is divided into four parts: the origins of the games, the competitions themselves, training and preparation, and the final victory. Well-detailed placards explain what the images represent in the general theme of the exhibit, helping visitors to place each object in context and offering anecdotes that further illustrate the background behind the games.
Sprinters and discus throwers, wrestlers and charioteers are all depicted in images scattered across vases, bowls, and frescoes. The original Olympic competition only involved footraces, and it is often startling to see how similar the renderings of marathoners are on the red- and black-faced pottery, especially in comparison to how the sport is captured in photographs and artwork today.
The spirit captured in the artwork seems as if it would be at home at Fenway as it did near Olympia. Runners stretched out in a ragged line struggle to reach the finish first, and victors are heaped with praises, decorated with crowns of laurel leaves as they are acclaimed for their athletic prowess.
But "Games for the Gods" doesn't only include abstract representations of victories and defeats; also present in the collection are select artifacts that provide insight into the everyday life of the ancient athlete.
The ancient runner, visitors will discover, scraped sweat and olive oil off his body with a bent spoon-like tool called a strigil. One prize from a Macedonian tomb, a glistening laurel crown that is delicately crafted out of gold, provides some insight into how these athletes would have been revered during their life.
Most of the ancient festivals originated as tributes to the gods, and these deities were often physically present at the competition in powerfully eye-catching ways. One of the more impressive pieces in the exhibit is a bearded, impassive marble head of Zeus, which is believed to be modeled after the original 42-foot gold and ivory statue of the thunder god that would have towered above the premiere competition at Olympia.
Mythology and athletic competition were irrepressibly intertwined in ancient Greece, and the Museum of Fine Arts exhibit makes a visible effort to pay tribute to this fact. Athena and Hermes, Poseidon and Apollo are all represented on pottery and statues throughout the collection, demonstrating how connected the blessed athletes felt to their gods.
Also present is the lion skin-clad Heracles, the semi-divine son of Zeus who came to epitomize the image of the Greek athlete. Heracles was the ancient world's version of David Ortiz, an iron man who could fell his enemies with a single blow, decimate the competition with his speed and strength, and even managed the equivalent of single-handedly cleaning up Boston after Wednesday's post-game celebration by diverting two rivers from their beds to wash the Augean stables clean.
The diverse artwork and piecemeal facts help to paint a fuller picture of what the world of the ancient athlete must have been like and bring the ancient games alive for visitors, be they Classics aficionados or bandwagon Red Sox fans. After seeing the competition and the struggle, the praying and the hope that were all profoundly present in the life of the original Olympic athletes, visitors are left not with a sense of historic indifference, but with the ironic feeling that maybe the Greeks weren't really that different from us after all.
"Games for the Gods: The Greek Athlete and the Olympic Spirit" is on display at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts through November 28. Admission is free with a Tufts ID.
