It begins with a startling vision of love at first sight, painted by an Athenian artist c530BC. The Greek hero Achilles is shown in glinting black armour, bearing down on Penthesilea, leader of the Amazons. Just as his spear pierces her white throat, their eyes meet and Achilles falls in love. His visible eye, in profile, grows lar ge with the double shock of recognition. Hers is a dying full stop.
As a metaphor for war, this urn painting could hardly be surpassed: love and life pointlessly destroyed in a fatal split second. And what are they even fighting about? Everyone knows the myth of origin. Trojan prince Paris abducts Helen, wife of Spartan king Menelaus. The Greeks lay siege to Troy in revenge. A decade of war ends only when Odysseus comes up with the ruse of a gigantic wooden horse, filled with soldiers, which the Trojans foolishly drag inside their city only to be massacred by night. Blood runs in torrents, drenching the earth.
But what is so remarkable about this British Museum show, which sometimes feels as sprawling as Troy itself, is the many variations of this story it encompasses. Take Helen of Troy. Was she abducted, did she go willingly, why isn’t she known as Helen of Sparta? Why is she stinted in Homer’s Iliad, and never even makes it to Troy in Euripides’ eponymous play. These questions seem newly reasonable, here, in front of so many different depictions.
For what did Helen actually look like? Face like thunder, vast nose and bigger chin, according to one Etruscan wall painting; hair down to her knees, according to another. On an Athenian water jar from 470BC she is pert nosed, with high breasts and luxurious curls, her toga covered with sparkles. And perhaps she knows her own beauty, staring approvingly at herself in the mirror on a Grecian urn.
But in an Etruscan tomb relief, she simply looks like everybody else in the milling scene. And what’s equally striking is that Paris appears conspicuously bored, as his soldiers shove Helen on to the ship like another spoil of war. Perhaps she was just a military pawn, and the thousand ships were launched more by belligerence than beauty.
Red-figure jar, c480-470BC: Odysseus, strapped to the mast, sails past the Sirens. Photograph: British Museum
Achilles, bravest hero of them all, may appear in action on the battlefield, but he is also depicted dragging the corpse of Hector behind his chariot until it turns to a pulp, and slitting the throat of one Trojan teenager after another in psychotic vengeance. Women and children are shown lined up for slaughter, on vases, marble carvings and friezes. In a 20th-century painting by Cy Twombly, veils of quivering blood form the letter A: Achilles, and his deadly spear tip.
The Twombly is significant of a zeal for contemporary relevance that includes a devastating film of Syrian women refugees performing Euripides’ Trojan Women in 2013: what will become of them now that their homes and families have been destroyed? The parallels are horrifying. Not incidentally, one of the performers has argued that their film is now being used by the British Museum to “artwash” the activities of its sponsor, BP. (Anyone wishing to join the protest can do so through the campaign Culture Unstained.)
But the legacy of Troy in western art – the theme of the show’s lugubrious and space-wasting second half – is in general an array of mediocrity. A single Rubens can’t make up for all the slavering depictions of a half-naked Helen or the reams of pre-Raphaelite schlock. And whoever thought the show should end as it does, with a 19th-century mock-up of Achilles’ shield, followed by a neon abstraction from the 20th century, has no idea how to run an epic.
I should also mention, by way of warning against sharp disappointment, that there is no giant wooden horse at the British Museum. There’s a kind of po-mo array of suspended bentwood ribs that conjures the innards of a whale more effectively than a horse. But despite the colossal space available, and all the marvellous craftsmanship involved in the lighting and display of this dark and twinkling city of a show, the only simulation of a Trojan horse is a miniature prop from a movie.
Far more successful is the hinge-point gallery devoted to the discovery of Troy as a real place. This has been the subject of warring opinions pretty much running back to Homer’s Iliad, with its reference to the city of Ilium in northern Turkey. Among the many judicious quotations from literature exquisitely lettered at apt moments through the show is Byron’s wonderful description of the emptiness of the landscape where he searched for Troy: “where I sought for Ilion’s walls,/ The quiet sheep feeds, and the tortoise crawls”.
For centuries, Troy was thought to have been at a place called Bounarbashi. But the Scottish journalist and geologist Charles Maclaren suggested in 1822 that Troy lay beneath Hisarlik, and the Englishman Frank Calvert, who owned part of the site, excavated there in 1863. The German archaeologist and showman Heinrich Schliemann took the glory, however, discovering all kinds of treasures to reinforce his theory. These included the very owl-faced pots you see in this show, which he thought related to the Trojan cult of Athena, and jars incised with what looks to modern eyes like crude decoration but Schliemann believed to be ancient writing.
All of these objects are displayed at the bottom of a deep, dark space, something like Schliemann’s trench, and superbly lit so that you see their pale elliptical forms turning up, as he did, like precious potatoes in the heavy black soil. But more affecting still is a small fragment of marble incised with Greek script. The words commemorate a real woman called Hieroklea, who once lived here. But they were once thought to be from the tomb of Achilles.
In all the bloody heroics, the panegyrics devoted to gods and goddesses and quite possibly mythical figures on both sides of the war, these moments of reality are vital. And so are the more human and intimate visions. Priam is shown pleading for the mutilated body of his son Hector on a small silver cup, where he is forced to kiss the murderer’s hands. Only imagine what it was to raise this cup to your own lips.
A Roman wall painting shows Aeneas with the legendary arrow stuck in his thigh, while his young son sobs into the folds of his toga. Behind them, Aeneas’s mother, Venus – half-human, half-divine – shimmers like a spectre. Odysseus, strapped to the mast, thwarts the will of the Sirens, nose-diving birds with female faces, wings clattering above his ship.
And as Helen walks the gangplank in a painting from Pompeii, her expression is unwilling, courageous, aghast. It is a tremendous work of art, to rival all the poetry, an omen of the future full of foreboding.
