Patrocinio dell’Assessore all’Industria Turistica e Culturale – Gestione e Valorizzazione dei Beni Culturali della Regione Puglia

concesso con disposizione n. SP6/0000169/2019Patrocinio del Presidente della Giunta Regionale concesso con decreto n° 158 del 14 marzo 2019

Con il patrocinio della Provincia di Taranto

Provincia di Taranto

Con il patrocinio del Comune di Taranto

Comune di Taranto

III SECTION - Activities of the Carabinieri Headquarters for the Protection of Cultural HeritageThe Carabinieri Headquarters for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, instituted in 1969, has just turned its fifty years of activity. Functionally included in the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, with whom it directly collaborates, it performs the functions concerning security and Italian cultural heritage protection through prevention and repression of all the violations; it is also the main centre of information and analysis for all Italian law enforcement agencies. The exposed vessels have been returned to Italy thanks to a complex international investigative activity. The investigations started during the last decade of the last century and led to identify in Geneva a society detaining illegally many archaeological exhibits kept in an armoured caveau and even showed in a sort of show-room for the selling negotiations.Between 2006 and 2008 refund deals were signed with many American Museums (Fine Arts Museum of Boston, Getty Museum of Malibu, Metropolitan Art Museum of New York etc.) thanks to the Cultural Heritage Ministry’s work of inquiry and of awareness raising Heritage, and also thanks to the intervention of the Legal Council of State and of the Foreign Affairs Minister that came to impose new ethical standards in the Antiquities acquisition.It is so that today these mastepieces can be admired in the region that has produced and guarded them and for centuries.

Storie ritrovate di uomini ed eroi

Curated by

Eva DEgl’InnocEntI anna consonnI, luca DI Franco, lorEnzo MancInI

11 APRIL - 10 NOVEMBER 2019

National Archaeological Museum of Taranto via Cavour 10, Taranto

From Monday to Saturday and OPENDAY: from 8,30 to 19,30 (last entry: 19,00).

On Sunday except OPENDAY and festivities: from 9,00 to 13,00 and from 15,30 to 19,30.

Per info e prenotazioni: tel. 099-4538639; e-mail: prenotazioni@novaapulia.it

NATIONAL ARCHAEOLOGICAL MUSEUM OF TARANTO

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The exhibitionMythoMania. Newfound stories of men and heroes displays a series of red-figure vases taken away by force from their context and then returned thanks to the concrete commitment of the Carabinieri Headquarters for the Protection of Cultural Heritage: pottery masterpieces found during clandestine excavations in Apulia and taken to overseas museums through illegal exportation. For the first time, these treasures can be admired all together at the National Archaeological Museum of Taranto, the city where the production of the red-figure pottery named Apulian originated.

The “lost background”MythoMania is not only an exhibition on the theme of archaeological heritage protection against the risk of dispersion, but also an attempt to refund the loosing of the original context through the rebuilding of the cultural background laying behind the production, the diffusion and the use of these artistic masterpieces. Thanks to this “lost background”, the figures painted on them can tell again newfound stories of men and heroes using the mythological language not just as a “mania”, as the exhibition’s title intentionally suggests, but as a way to share values and identity.The exhibition is organized in three sections: the histories of men (Section I) and heroes of the myth (Section II)

II SECTION - Theatre and Apulian vase-paintingFor ancient Greeks Drama represented an inexhaustible source of images and stories. Some of the vessels returned to the National Archaeological Museum of Taranto are characterized by a detailed and refined iconography, related to mythological episodes as imagined by Attic playwrights. In fact, a line of research has emerged in archaeological literature that glimpsed in these figurative representations, especially in the Italiot red-figure pottery, a transposal of the most famous Attic tragedies. Euripides’ Andromeda (the story of a young princess offered as sacrificial victim to a sea monster and saved by the intervention of the hero Perseo) performed in 412 B.C. and preserved only through fragments, is a relevant example of a plausible influence: three vases, in which different moments of the story are illustrated, are exposed all together in this section.The dinos (a globular vessel) of the Darius Painter depicts the myth of Busiris, an Egyptian king who used to sacrifice on Zeus’ altar all the foreigners who dared to enter his reign. He was finally killed by Herakles.

represented on the vases and the activity of the Carabinieri Headquarters for the Protection of Cultural Heritage (Section III).

I SECTION - Apulian pottery and funerary ideologyMore than 90% of Apulian vessels comes from necropolis. But the burial is not only their final destination: the characteristics of the exposed vessels in fact show that they were conceived to be exhibited during the funerary rituals and then laid down in the tomb. The relationship between the Apulian pottery and funerary ideology emerges both at the level of the vessels’ shapes and in their painted images: young boys or girls bearing offerings to the grave in the form of a stele, a column or a more complex architecture, inside of which the deceased is represented, rarer depictions of the Underworld, or mythological scenes.It is necessary to consider these images in their totality to well understand their meaning, examining for example the variety of the offerings or the relationship between ritual scenes and the mythological depictions combining with them. Indeed, every vessel reveals to be a complex text able to tell stories of men and women experiencing their social lives and struggling against their fears and their hopes that are common to every human being.

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