PRINCETON, NEW HERSEY.- Centaurs, satyrs, and other fantastic Greek composite creatures have captured the imagination for thousands of years, through visually exciting tales of monsters battling famous heroes in distant lands. This fall, the Princeton University Art Museum sheds new light on this phenomenon in The Centaur’s Smile: The Human Animal in Early Greek Art (through January 18, 2004), the first U.S. exhibition to focus on this theme in art history.  

"Half horse and half man, centaurs straddled two worlds, between the rough freedom of nature and the reasoned ascent of human culture," said J. Michael Padgett, curator of Ancient art at the Princeton University Art Museum. Wild and libidinous, like Nessos, who assaulted the wife of Herakles, centaurs also could be noble and wise, like Cheiron, the teacher of Achilles and Asklepios. "In their ambivalent nature is a key to the Greek soul, and by examining their role in early Greek art - as well as that of satyrs, sphinxes, sirens, and other mythical mixed beings - we may find clues both to their essential meaning and to their significance in ancient Greek culture."  

The Centaur’s Smile features 100 select objects in a variety of media - painted ceramic vases; sculptural reliefs in stone and clay; bronze and terracotta statuettes; jewelry and metalwork in gold, silver, and electrum; and engraved gems in rock crystal, jasper, and cornelian - 21 works from the museum’s permanent collection, with the rest on loan from 37 public and private collections in the United States, France, and Spain. This includes such famous masterworks as the Geometric Style bronze group of a warrior battling a centaur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said to have been found at Olympia; a bronze centaur statuette from the Bibliothéque National, Paris, found on the Athenian Acropolis in the nineteenth century; and a bronze statuette of a centaur from the museum’s permanent collection, which is considered one of the finest Greek bronzes in the world. The exhibition will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (February 22 - May 16, 2004).  

Human animals played a central role in Greek myth and are ubiquitous in Greek literature and art, as well as in the art of other Mediterranean peoples influenced by Greek culture, most notably the Etruscans and the Romans. Diverse in form, origin, and character, mythical mixed beings or Mischwesen first appeared in Greece during the Bronze Age, in Minoan and Mycenaean art, only to vanish during the subsequent cultural hiatus of the Greek Dark Ages (1100-950 B.C.). Their gradual reappearance in the sculpture and ceramics of the Protogeometric and Geometric Periods (950 - 700 B.C.) reflected a new era of contact between Greece and the ancient cultures of Egypt and the Near East that was to prove decisive in the formation of Greece’s own seminal civilization. As such, the evolving forms and roles of human animals in early Greek art are important indicators of the nature and degree of contact between Greece and its eastern neighbors.  

Beyond the question of origin, the exhibition explores the meaning these creatures initially and ultimately had for the Greeks. Sirens, for example, have a limited role in myth, confined essentially to their encounter with Odysseus, as related by Homer. In art, however, sirens are exceedingly common, often in contexts that suggest they had multiple or layered meanings, primarily as symbols of death and as enforcers of divine will or retribution. The Sphinx is best known for its deadly riddle and the famous solution by Oedipus, but it, too, was a very common figure in Greek art, multiplied freely as the occasion warrants, unencumbered by narrative but nonetheless symbolically charged.  

The Centaur’s Smile was conceived in 1998 after the museum acquired an important Greek bronze statuette of a centaur dating to about 530 B.C., which is a signature piece in the exhibition. A masterpiece of the mature Archaic style with an enigmatic "Archaic smile," the statuette epitomizes the Greek conception of the centaurs of legend. In the spring of 2000, Michael Padgett taught an undergraduate symposium on the human animal in early Greek art in collaboration with Professor William Childs of Princeton’s Department of Art and Archaeology, which enabled students to examine and research art objects from the museum’s collection.  

"The Centaur’s Smile reveals the broad, popular appeal of mythical monsters, as well as the depth of the museum’s holdings in this area of Greek iconography," said Susan M. Taylor, director of the Princeton University Art Museum. "The exhibition is a wonderful fulfillment of the museum’s multiple missions: finding innovative ways to make our collection accessible to the public, advancing the field of art history through new scholarship, and fostering the development of critical thinking and visual literacy at Princeton."   

Exhibition Details - The Centaur’s Smile focuses on the religious, sociological, and psychological significance composite creatures had for the early Greeks by examining their antecedents in the arts of Egypt and the Near East. The exhibition primarily focuses on Greek art from the Late Geometric to the Early Classical periods (750 - 450 B.C.), including painted ceramics from Corinth, Athens, Sparta, and Ionia that portray the full range of relevant Greek myths. Several Egyptian and Near Eastern objects that are earlier in date demonstrate how the prototypes of Greek Mischwesen had been in existence for centuries. A selection of Etruscan objects produced under the influence of Greek models reveals the way in which composite creatures were further transformed by Italian artisans.  

The exhibition pays special attention to the two creatures that are part horse and part human: centaurs and satyrs. The horse was an important animal in early Greece, denoting wealth and social status. In Hellenistic and Roman art, satyrs came to be associated with the god Pan and gradually evolved into creatures whose form was part goat. In early Greek art, their long equine tails and ears are closely related to those of the centaurs, with whom they also shared a number of character traits, most notably a fondness for wine. There are differences as well: satyrs are more playful and openly lustful than centaurs, for example, and also more cowardly. These differences speak to an ambivalence in the Greek conception of the horse.  

The proud carriage and undoubted battle courage of the centaurs resemble qualities of aristocratic mortal horsemen, representations of which are commonplace in early Greek art. In bronze and clay statuettes, the body of the rider is sometimes melded into that of his steed, while in vase-painting it was common to show two horses with overlapping bodies. The exhibition explores whether the affinities of form among horse-men and "horsemen" offer clues to the essential nature of centaurs, which as monsters "fit for heroes" may have shared in the positive symbolism associated with horses.