POLISHED ECHOES OFTHE ROMAN EMPIRE
We can only imagine how the French farmer Prosper Taurin reacted on the first day of spring in 1830, when his plow struck a bulky object in his field in Normandy, near the village of Berthouville.
Did he patiently step around to inspect what could have been a tree stump? Or, did he utter some early-19th-century equivalent of “merde”? And how quickly his irritation must have turned to awe as the farmer found he had unearthed an ancient Roman tile.
About eight inches farther underground, Taurin discovered a priceless hoard of heavily tarnished and encrusted, but elaborately decorated, silver and gold objects.
It must have seemed too good to be true, although Taurin was superstitious about touching objects that might be cursed. He used his farm implements to dig up the treasure that had been buried for nearly two millennia, damaging some of the delicate pieces. But he didn’t cash in by melting down the find — 55 pounds of silver that included two statuettes and more than 70 vessels.
Taurin took his cache to a relative who contacted
a lawyer, who alerted French authorities. After a bidding war that involved the Louvre, the Berthouville Treasure, as it came to be known, went to the coins, metals and antiquities department of the French National Library. It has resided there ever since, beside gold, silver and jewels collected from the ancient world by the many kings of France.
This winter, however, the Berthouville Treasure is sparkling at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in a show that turns the downstairs gallery of the Beck Building into an exquisite jewel box that provides a rare view into the antiquities of ancient cultures.
That is the final stop on a four-venue tour following a four-year effort by the J. Paul Getty Villa in Malibu, Calif., to research and conserve the collection while the French National Library underwent a building renovation.
Getty curator Kenneth Lapatin, a tall man in his mid-50s with bookish, round spectacles and a mop of silver curls, still sounds excited when he tells the buried-treasure story.
He’s just as fascinated by the knowledge the Berthouville Treasure has yielded about the culture of the Roman Empire, the mysteries that remain and the tantalizing sense it gives of what else has been lost. Offerings to Mercury
Centuries before Taurin tilled it, the French farmer’s land was on a far edge of the Roman Empire, near a major crossroads where the River Seine meets the coast of what is now the English Channel.
The site held a shrine, perhaps a place of pilgrimage akin to Lourdes, although it is not mentioned in ancient texts.
When French archaeologists explored Taurin’s property in 1861 and 1896 and recovered more fragments of ancient Rome, they found evidence the site once held a large enclosure of buildings unlike typical Greek or Roman temples. Nine years ago, archaeologists confirmed those subterranean features with ground-penetrating electrical resistivity imaging. They learned the treasure had been stashed in an outside colonnade.
“It seems to have been a vault for a sanctuary that would have been used maybe once or twice a year, when the goodies would be brought out and displayed. Then they were hidden away,” Lapatin said. “Then something happened, and they were never found again. That’s why we have them today.”
The treasures were offerings to the Roman god Mercury, whom the Greeks called Hermes. Familiar to many today as the running FTD Florist figure, Mercury was a minor deity in the heart of the Roman Empire but revered as a bearer of prosperity in the province of Gaul, which became France. Lapatin thinks this temple’s Mercury was probably a Romanized version of a god who had been there a long time.
The objects in the hoard were dedicated by different people at different times. The range of goods — from plain little bowls to lavish, large pitchers — suggests that all levels of society gathered at the temple.
“So we have this microcosm of this community that’s kind of out in the middle of nowhere.”
A woman known as Germanissa (“German woman”) was a major donor. But the most opulent pieces bear Latin inscriptions from the Roman citizen Quintus Domitius Tutus. Most of them were family heirlooms, dedicated later to Mercury as vows.
Lapatin knows this because most of Tutus’ offerings feature motifs about Bacchus, the god of wine, and other famous mythological scenes. Their intri- cate details are rendered in high relief, sometimes embellished with gold.
Lapatin motioned toward a pair of vessels that have outer shells of repoussé work, hammered from behind. Stories within stories unfold in the imagery, which presents opposing themes on each side: a satyr (male centaur) on one side, a maenad (female centaur) on the other; one in ecstasy, one in agony. Surrounded by peacocks, panthers and winged cupids, the centaurs hold miniature vessels with other scenes that inform the narrative.
Lapatin marveled at the astonishing detail of a scene with a maenad banging on a drum. In front of her, a panther emerges from a vessel, ridden by a cupid playing a double flute, and behind them, a basket of mystical Dionysian implements rests on a pillar. And that whole scene is reflected, in reverse, in fractions of an inch, the maenad’s drum.
Most of these pieces were made as pairs.
“Games like this are taking place on both sides of this cup, so they respond one to the other, and one cup to the other,” Lapatin said.
For Romans who could afford it, such items would have provided banquet debate about issues such as what it means to live and die heroically, and how you treat dead bodies.
Lapatin thinks a beaker with images of exploits at Isthmia was probably part of a four-piece “collector’s set” that also would have commemorated the Delphian, Nemean and Olympic Games of ancient Greece. The set might have celebrated the winner of a “periodonikes,” or grand slam.
“All of these objects have lives, and we can really see that unpacking the stories in each one,” Lapatin said. ‘Tons and tons’ of silver
One of the exhibition’s two back galleries offers a glimpse of what archaeologists and conservators are dealing with today when they handle such antiquities — not just piecing broken objects back together or giving them a gentle steam cleaning but also understanding rougher repairs made in the 19th century.
The adjacent gallery holds a gorgeous assortment of other ancient treasures from the French National Library, including the “Patera of Rennes,” a shallow libation bowl that is one of the few surviving examples of Roman gold tableware; and the silver and gold plate known as the “Shield of Scipio,” which was taken from the Rhône River in 1656.
During his research, Lapatin visited Berthouville and found Taurin’s land looking much as it would have before the discovery: a small rise with a commanding view of the surrounding plain.
Crops of private farmland now cover the 19thcentury excavations, and a passerby could easily miss the small historical marker on the road.
Even Lapatin will likely never know exactly what happened there two millennia ago. Had the treasure not been buried and forgotten, it would likely not have survived, he said.
“Tons and tons” of Roman silver were melted down during many centuries, and the Berthouville Treasure is better preserved than anything that remains from Pompeii, Herculaneum or Rome.
For ancient Romans, who clearly had more riches than they knew what to do with, it would have been a drop in a vast silver bucket.
Trying to wrap his mind around the big question, given the exquisite craftsmanship of the luxurious objects on display, Lapatin speaks of ancient history in the present tense: “If this is what’s happening in this small place, kind of distant, what’s happening everywhere else through the empire? … If we’re finding this dedicated by a rich patron out in Berthouville, imagine what we’ve lost from the tables of the senators and emperors of Rome?”