【Exhibition】The Golden Legend / Friday 16 October 2015 – Monday 11 January 2016

The lake-like Black Sea expands deep in the hinterlands of the Mediterranean region. The Bosporus Strait is the entrance to the Black Sea from the Mediterranean, and is renowned as a difficult sea-lane. According to Greek mythology, the hero Jason successfully sailed his shipArgo through this treacherous strait; his goal, the Golden Fleece of a kingdom on the shores of the Black Sea. With the help of Queen Medea, Jason acquired the Golden Fleece, and thus grew the legend of the Black Sea region as concealing golden riches. But, about 40 years ago it was discovered that this was something more than simple legend. Tombs were found in the Bulgarian town of Varna on the Black Sea coast that contained a massive number of golden burial goods. These funerary goods are known today as the world’s oldest golden items, dating to more than 6,000 years ago, even before the oldest pyramids in Egypt. The deceased, reduced to bones today, were found holding golden staffs and wearing large gold armlets. The round pieces of gold scattered around the skeleton were the decorations on the clothing that once garbed the deceased. This exhibition presents a reconstruction of the contents of tombs as they appeared when they were discovered, alongside the display of paintings recounting the legend of Jason and the Argonauts’ pursuit of the then ancient Golden Fleece.

Then some three millennia after the golden treasure of the Black Sea, goldsmithing of incomparable intricacy and quality flourished on in the Etruscan civilization on the Italian Peninsula. The superb artistry of Etruscan gold, whose technologies remain a mystery today, can be seen in the renowned golden armlet from the Vatican Museums. This exhibition presents numerous masterpieces of gold work from the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean region, along with paintings on the theme of gold, reminding us that the human fascination with the material gold is as old as mankind.