Ancient Cultural Exchanges Are Reexamined at Prada Foundation
“Global Antiquity: Cultural Interactions in Afroeurasian Space 600 BCE to 1000 CE” brings together artworks and artifacts from over 60 institutions worldwide to revisit how civilizations were linked through trade, politics, and religious exchange
Since the Prada Foundation opened in Milan in 2015, Miuccia Prada has made sure it has been a place of the unexpected. On its multi-part campus (once home to a gin distillery), there is an entire building coated in 24-carat gold leaf, a bar designed by Wes Anderson, a huge ceramic relief by Lucio Fontana, once made for a Milan movie palace, now in Prada’s own cinema lobby. Even the first temporary exhibition in its central, all-glass Podium gallery was a surprise. Called “Serial Classic,” it was a show of exquisite ancient Roman statues, marble muscles gleaming inside the windows.
While that might not seem an obvious choice for a foundation whose name is synonymous with nylon backpacks, jolie-laide chic, and managing to deliver the shoe of the season every season, it could have been seen as a clever twist on the business of fashion, as well as an investigation of classical practice. “Serial Classic” examined the multiple copies made by the Romans of the Greeks’ most exalted works. The Greek originals often became lost; the Roman version prevailed. It could just sound like the endless re-editing of fashion itself.
Now the curator of “Serial Classic,” Salvatore Settis, returns to the foundation with the third in this series—the second, “Recycling Beauty,” was in 2022—and again spearheaded exhibition design with the Fondazione’s original architect, OMA founding partner Rem Koolhaas, for a show called “Global Antiquity: Cultural Interactions in Afroeurasian Space 600 BCE to 1000 CE.” The array of nearly 150 objects, arranged on fiberglass grids in a continuous hexagon, offers extraordinary insight into the dynamic webs of trade and exchange that allowed imagery, ideas, techniques, languages, theologies, myths, and materials to travel dynamically all around the ancient world from the Mediterranean to the farthest reaches of Asia. “We decided not to put the objects on pedestals,” Koolhaas explains, “as we wanted to create equality between them and the visitor.” Every work is at eye level.
“It teaches us that the past was not static,” Miuccia Prada writes in her introduction to the catalogue, describing the flow of trade and ideas. It also suggests that we should be more interested in continuing these fruitful exchanges today—or “challenge the conception of a world made of impermeable cultural and political blocs,” as Sanjay Subrahmanyam pens in a later essay from the forthcoming scholarly publication.
The three-year curatorial approach was a deep dive, with over 60 international institutions contacted for loans. Some failed to land—an astonishing Scythian gold bow case from the 4th century BCE, for example, decorated with scenes from the life of Achilles, depicted how Greek myths traveled miles across the Eurasian steppes. It couldn’t be transported from the National Museum in Ukraine, despite huge efforts. Certain Chinese institutions refused to co-operate. The absences have been marked, with images inserted where these pieces were meant to be.
“I wanted to tell the truth, to talk about today’s prohibitions and restrictions,” Settis says. “The Ukrainians really wanted to lend the piece, but it was impossible to convince an insurance company to cover it. A piece from Tehran was agreed, then the war in Iran started.” Koolhaas further noted that many conversations were about “contemporary politics.”
While this might be an exhibition that unpacks migration, the wine trade, and the spread of deities and mythological heroes—Heracles in his knotted lion skin appears as a statue, on Alexandrian coins, and the same tied-lion-skin look on a deity in Gandhara and Tang dynasty funerary statues in China—it packs an aesthetic punch too. Among the most beautiful pieces are those from the graves of two young women from Rome’s Syrian community dating from the 2nd century—gold jewels, dolls made of Indian ivory, and a spindle of amber imported from the far-off Baltic Sea. Next to them is a gold diadem set with sapphires from Sri Lanka that belonged to a woman in Colonna near Rome.
Chess, it turns out, was played everywhere, though probably invented in northern India in the 6th century before it spread both west and eastwards. Here is a rock crystal set that was discovered in Spain, and one in bone found in Uzbekistan. Astrolabes, astronomical instruments used to measure height, depth, and distance, had been conceived in Hellenic Greece before being perfected in the Arab and Persian territories in the 8th century. Here they are, from Baghdad and Andalusia, finely wrought in brass, now on loan from Qatar and a foundation in Verona, Italy.
Meanwhile, Buddha travels far and wide, in grey schist from Gandhara, a region now between Pakistan and Afghanistan; on gold coins in Afghanistan, the name inscribed in Greek; in the Egyptian temple of Isis in Berenike, carved from Greek marble; and even in a Christian iteration, made in wood and discovered in Asia Minor. What the exhibition suggests is that, far from being a series of completely unique pieces, these ancient works are all inexorably connected.
“The way things traveled shows a globality,” said Rem Koolhaas in a talk after the opening last week, pointedly not referring to the current flattening force of globalization. “It is a voluntary communication between civilizations, something which creates hybrids, something enriching.” Here at the Prada Foundation, as in fashion, there is ample meaning to plumb from the past.
“Global Antiquity: Cultural Interactions in Afroeurasian Space 600 BCE to 1000 CE” is on view through March 1 2027