yucolo.com :: Martin-Gropius-Bau

27 junio 2008 – 28 septiembre 2008

Painting for Eternity. The Tombs of Paestum

With its three large Doric temples, Paestum became a well-known site early on thanks to engravings by Piranesi (1777/78) and Goethe’s impressive descriptions in his Italienische Reise (1787). However, many people are unaware that Paestum contains one of the greatest treasure troves of ancient fresco paintings: During excavations in the 1960s, around 200 richly painted tombs from the Lucanian period (4th century B.C.) were discovered. These rare examples of ancient tomb art can now be seen for the first time outside Italy at the Bucerius Kunst Forum. The Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Paestum has loaned around 45 of the painted tomb slabs for this exhibition in Hamburg, including seven complete tombs.

The extremely heavy slabs will be reassembled for the exhibition into three-dimensional tombs for the first time since their discovery, allowing the paintings to be seen in their original context. Visitors have the unique opportunity to look into the tombs and receive a sense of their composition and size. Simultaneously, the life of a long-vanished culture unfolds, depicting battle scenes, sports events and competitions as well as the burial rites of the Lucani, an Italian tribe which lived in the former Greek colony of Paestum around 400 B.C. Exhibiting the tombs in their entirety gives insight into the way the paintings were developed: Following the death, the slabs, plastered in limestone, were lowered into the earth and painted by the artists in the narrow tomb cavity within just a few hours. The burial probably took place on the same day and the tombs were then sealed. Thus the pictures in the tombs were removed from the sight of the living, destined to accompany the deceased in the afterlife.

Painting for Eternity. The Tombs of Paestum

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