Exhibitions: 7 Millenniums Under One Roof

EXHIBITIONS 7 Millenniums Under One Roof "The last 6,000 years of human history are most interesting," Alfred North Whitehead once remarked to a dinner companion. If the philosopher could have attended the current exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., he would have had to increase his span by a millennium. The Archaeological Museum of Teheran and a major private Iranian collection have been spilled open to provide the U.S. with a show of 735 objects, many of them only recently discovered, from 7,000 years of Persian art.

The thriving cities where the art was fashioned—Marlik, Shapur, Kashan, Nishapur, Tepe Hissar—have crumbled into oblivion. The fabled rulers and scourges of Persia—Cyrus the Great, Darius the Great, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan—are dust. But a woman's bronze bracelet, a golden goblet, a statue of an ibex with circleted horns remain to testify to the enduring victory that art wins over time.

Totemic Alliances. The earlier millenniums are dominated by goldsmiths, silversmiths, pottery makers, and bronze-casters, the later by workers in glass. Many of the objects glitter with elegance and beauty, partly because they were intended for royal use and partly because the Iranian artists knew the value of refracting light. By using curved and slanted surfaces they could make a gold drinking cup glint and dazzle from every angle.

One motif of the show is the easy interplay between man and beast, myth and daily life. The winged bulls and lions on vases and breastplates represent totemic alliances by which ancient man sought to acquire the power of the strongest beasts to fend off the evil forces around him. But in their arresting regality, these beasts bear themselves like demigods, not mere-animals.

Also a Rug. Sometimes the artists aimed at subtler, more evocative effects. A pitcher will have a gracefully elongated spout that suggests the head and neck of a crane. Undulating snakes represent water, the perennial need of hot, parched lands. While the Iranian artists frequently represented animals naturalistically, they occasionally resorted to a kind of symbolic shorthand that foreshadows the geometric forms of modern art, using circles for eyes, U-shaped mouths and heart-shaped ears. The millennial parade culminates, fittingly if inevitably, with a sumptuous 16th century Persian rug, the art object that has been one of the world's household words in all recent centuries.

The show at the National Gallery ends July 19, but Washington is sharing its Iranian treasures with seven other cities. First stop will be Denver, starting August 8; then the show will go to Kansas City, Houston, Cleveland, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles, stopping six weeks in each city.