Soon after entering the new Prada Foundation in Milan, a visitor comes upon a row of muscular forms posing behind a sheet of glass. They are all nude, no sartorial flourishes covering the pearly expanses of skin— not even a thread of Prada. Even so, the 2,000-year-old Roman statues resemble displays in a high-end retail store, standing on clear acrylic bases below strip lighting. The effect is perhaps a wry nod to the fashion empire behind this extravagant new art campus in the industrial neighborhood of Largo Isarco.Designed by Dutch architecture firm OMA (led by Rem Koolhaas), the complex is the second exhibition venue opened by Miuccia Prada and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, since they established their foundation in 1993. (The Venetian palazzo on the Grand Canal was their first outpost.) The duo have said they do not want to “pollute” their art centers with slick branding. However, one of the new facility’s inaugural shows, “Serial Classic” (its second part showing in Venice) embodies themes at least conceptually related to their $10 billion empire built on the mechanical production of luxury goods.The exhibition seeks to present a revisionist history of Greek and Roman statuary. Using examples borrowed from the Louvre, the British Museum, and the Prado, the show claims to demonstrate that the Romans’ emulation of Hellenic culture, in particular their reproduction of Greek artworks many of which have been lost, resulted in meaningful, diverse forms of human expression. Or in the words of curator Salvatore Settis: “Seriality, replication, imitation, and appropriation were as important, throughout the Classical period, as invention and originality.”This might sound like a very contemporary reading of ancient art — and it is. Viewers are asked to see the Classical tradition through the prism of the Warholian revolution that abolished the divide between art and the serial reproduction of, say, the commercial fashion industry. It is a brilliant conceit, but it raises awkward questions about recasting ancient history in our own image and connecting it to the contemporary economic order. It makes current means of production feel predetermined.The show opens with a vitrine of Greek bronze fragments: tiny curled fingers, flat eyelids, coils of hair, a lonely ear. These are the remnants of thousands of Greek statues that once graced Olympia, only 2 percent of which remain today. The bronzes were melted down in the Middle Ages, while the marble ones were repurposed in churches or palazzos. It is only because the Romans so doggedly copied the Greek originals that we have an idea of what the works created by sculptors like Phidias, Myron, Polyclitus, and Praxiteles looked like. Romans even made copies of the copies, often grouping them in series: a pair of satyrs inside a villa courtyard, images of the god Pathos flanking a reception area.The exhibition also displays statues in little assemblages, all the Apollos, bathing Venuses, and Penelopes together, like with like. Visiting each colony can resemble solving one of those “spot the difference” puzzles on children’s menus. Barthes would call it discovering nuance, “the last state of color that can be named.” And, indeed, the quest can be rewarding, leading the viewer to discover what is alive, moving, irregular among the many reproductions.Of the crouching Venuses, for example, one holds a hand docilely to her head, coquettishly averting her eyes, while her neighbor, also crouched, looks more assertive, as if she might spring to action. The two runners, leaning aggressively forward, train their intense gazes on slightly different points. Examine the resting satyrs draped with panther skins and you discover that one has shifted his weight slightly more to one foot as he leans on a tree with a less knobby texture.In the end, however, it is not clear that all this adds up to a serious statement. The problem is embodied by one of the stars of the exhibition: the torso of a Greek statue of Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, which was found in 1945 in Persepolis, Iran. Displayed upstairs, it is surrounded by fragmented Roman copies. But the fragments do not, when put together, make up a whole; two and two do not equal four. By the time you reach the end of the final gallery, where a row of caryatids floats, suspended from the ceiling, the game of sorting through mechanical reproductions has grown dull. And aren’t those Medusa-like caryatids a bit Versace?
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