Irruption of Antiquity: The Benaki Museum 'Haunting' with Aleksandra Waliszewska

HighRes-2.jpg, default, Painting from the exhibition 'Irruption of Antiquity: Aleksandra Waliszewska' at the Benaki Museum, Athens, photo: press materials

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'Historical discourse is never “born.” It always recommences. And let us observe this: art history—the discipline which goes by that name—recommences each time.' — Georges Didi-Huberman

Snakes

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'UNTITLED' by Aleksandra Waliszewska, 2022, photo: IAM

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It is ironic that Cleopatra has become a metonym for ancient Egypt when, in fact, her origins are Macedonian Greek. Serving as the last pharaoh of the Ptolemaic dynasty—established in the Hellenistic period—Cleopatra VII (51–30 BCE) bookended an extraordinary moment in which Greece ruled a large swath of Egypt, their cultures and religions coexisting. One of the few Ptolemaic rulers to learn Egyptian, Cleopatra was a powerful polyglot whose knowledge of the many cultures of the region embodied the complexities of this period, even if she is remembered in popular culture as the quintessence of Egyptianness. One of the most romanticized aspects of the monarch’s life is her amorous entanglements with her Roman political rivals Julius Caesar and Mark Antony; so, too, is her death by suicide. Cleopatra’s choice to end her life after her armies were defeated by Roman forces was mythologized by historians and artists over the ages, with Plutarch claiming that she chose to die by snakebite, thereby cementing her means of death to her Egyptianized identity. Cleopatra and the fatal asp became an indelible image of Western visual culture, propagated by artists—and later Hollywood—over the centuries. A popular subject in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art, Cleopatra is almost always portrayed in a state of semi-undress, with artists focusing on her sensuous beauty and the display of her nude body. Leonardo da Pistoia’s portrayal shows the asp coiled around the topless Cleopatra like a necklace, conjuring ancient Greek conventions of gold jewelry formed in the shape of snakes (fig. 1).

Waliszewska, too, mines this iconography in her cropped depiction of a snake biting a woman’s breast, though her rendering imagines the serpent as a malevolent inversion of “Roman Charity,” another art historical trope that depicts a young woman breastfeeding an older man.

Here, the “male” role is played by a deadly reptile that appears to relish sucking at the woman’s nipple rather than simply delivering a fatal bite. As in so many of Waliszewska’s works, Eros and Thanatos are inextricably entwined.

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'UNTITLED' by Aleksandra Waliszewska, 2022, photo: IAM

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The pairing of this painting with first-century CE jewelry reinforces the talismanic charge of this iconography. The snake’s persistence in these images is not incidental. In classical antiquity, the serpent occupied a profoundly ambivalent position, oscillating between threat and regeneration, danger and protection. This duality is perhaps most clearly articulated in the cult of Asklepios, god of the medical arts, in which the snake plays an important role. In Asklepios’s myth, a snake licked his ears and taught him healing secrets, such as the use of particular herbs to bring people back to life. Through his story, the snake came to be seen as an agent of healing and renewal, persisting to this day as a symbol of medicine. In a marble votive inscribed relief from around the late fourth century BCE, Asklepios appears beside a tree trunk, encircled by a coiling serpent whose body winds tightly around the vertical axis of the image. The coiled snake mirrors the cyclical nature of time itself through shedding, return, and self-restoration.

The snake did not disappear with the end of antiquity; instead, it entered what Aby Warburg described as a Nachleben—the afterlife of images—through which forms survive beyond their original ritual or epistemic frameworks.

Even today, the snake endures not as a fixed symbol but as a charged visual trope capable of transmitting affect across historical rupture. Warburg called this phenomenon Pathosformel. Detached from cultic anchoring, the serpent becomes mobile, available for reactivation under radically altered cultural and psychological conditions.

It is precisely this mobility that structures the appearance of serpentine motifs in Waliszewska’s work. Her snakes emerge as autonomous, unsettling presences. In a second painting, a snake figure “stands” upright, wearing a top hat; he appears next to a mysterious woman’s face. Both characters are depicted against an otherworldly green backdrop, with a pink gradient at the horizon line. The woman’s status is unexplained, though her chartreuse irises suggest that she may be an upiór—the Polish term for the living dead (an ancient folk character that prefigures the vampire). In this instance, the snake migrates across iconographies as a charged gesture of hybridity.

Greek snake bracelet — Gold bracelet in the form of a snake with a broad head and slightly undulating tail, 1st century CE. Gold, 8.7 cm diam. Snake bracelets have a long tradition in Greek jewelry and were ex- tremely popular in antiquity due to their closely fitting form and talismanic character. The snake, as a creature of the underworld, symbolized the soul, and was an attribute of several gods and heroes. Because it sheds its skin, it is also associated with renewal and rebirth, photo: Benaki Museum / IAM

Snake bracelets have a long tradition in Greek jewelry and were extremely popular in antiquity due to their closely fitting form and talismanic character. The snake, as a creature of the underworld, symbolized the soul, and was an attribute of several gods and heroes. Because it sheds its skin, it is also associate with the living-dead woman, the snake-woman couple is a fusion of human and animal, desire and violence, death and life. In this sense, Waliszewska’s snakes reactivate antiquity rather than merely quote it. The ancient serpent reappears as a figure of instability and excess in Waliszewska’s oeuvre and, when coupled with female characters, underscores femininity as the site upon which power, danger, and desire are negotiated. This logic reaches a critical point in the figure of Cleopatra herself. Her death by asp, endlessly reimagined in Western art, stages a moment in which female sovereignty is both spectacularly asserted and decisively contained. The snake serves as the mediator through which political authority is translated into an eroticized demise, transforming the ruler into an image.

Seen from this perspective, the recurrence of the snake across antiquity and modernity does not signal continuity of meaning but continuity of tension; the serpent persists because it is uniquely suited to visualizing unstable forms of power that are both hybrid and gendered.

The Sun & Hellmouth

The personification of the sun is as old as human history. Long before the Polish astronomer Copernicus postulated that Earth orbits the sun at the center of the solar system, various ancient cultures ascribed human characteristics to the sun to comprehend and revere its elemental power. For the Greeks, it was the god Helios who rode his chariot across the sky, illuminating and warming the daytime, while in Egypt the deity Ra was depicted with a falcon’s head, above which hovers an illuminated disk (fig. 1). The Incas worshipped Inti, a god depicted as a golden sphere with a human face, who not only provided the earth with solar warmth but also controlled agriculture and fertility and governed the Incan royal families.

Drawing on the collective memory of these cultural archetypes, Waliszewska’s smirking orange orb dominates the canvas, radiating wispy flames from its nebulous body. Behind its quizzical grimace is the outline of a man and his dog in a dusky landscape. Backlit by this mysterious solar being, this classic Caspar David Friedrich Rückenfigur becomes a stand-in for all of humankind, searching for meaning amid the sublime wonderment of nature. Here, the anthropomorphized sun does not simply illuminate; it is an excessive presence, suggesting the ancient ambivalence toward solar power as both life-giving and annihilating—an affective tension that survives across cultures in images of radiant yet dangerous celestial bodies.

Waliszewska often mines art history for formal inspiration and for narrative tropes, transforming them into elements of her own visual universe. In this painting, she draws on an illuminated fifteenth-century manuscript entitled Les Visions du chevalier Tondal, which chronicled an Irish knight’s journey through heaven and hell (fig. 2). On one page, the illumination by Flemish artist Simon Marmion depicts an oval form with a halo of flames—the open mouth of hell. In Waliszewska’s visual retelling, the burning power of hell morphs into the equal might of the sun’s humanized face, merging the two mythologized entities into a layered icon, a fiery being capable of both nourishing life and punishing errant souls.

At the Benaki Museum, Waliszewska’s anthropomorphized sun-meets-hellmouth enters into a formal and symbolic dialogue with a fragment of a mosaic representing the head of Medusa on a circular medallion. This late Roman artifact (fig. 3) is schematic in execution; the Gorgoneion is rendered as a frontal, circular face with radiating hair, a visual echo of solar imagery. The mosaic functions less as a mythological portrait than as an apotropaic emblem comparable to ancient representations of Helios. Medusa and the sun’s face share a visual logic of overwhelming presence and wounding powers. Whereas the sun blinds with its light and radiation, Medusa can immobilize her victims into stone with her gaze. Suspended between nourishment and punishment, illumination and terror, Waliszewska’s fiery visage transforms the most familiar celestial body into a destabilizing presence that watches as much as it is watched.

The Mermaid

The mermaid’s origins can be traced to the ancient goddess Atargatis (Derceto, in Greek), who was worshipped in present-day Syria. She was associated with fertility and sexuality, and her image circulated among Mediterranean cultures during the Hellenistic era. The present-day iconography of the mermaid first appears in several European bestiaries during the Middle Ages, such as the Liber Monstrorum (late seventh–early eighth century) and the Bodleian Bestiary (fig. 1). Often called Sirens—a conflation of the mermaid with another hybrid creature of antiquity, the half-bird, half-woman chimera who tempted sailors with her seductive songs—these female pisciform creatures were feared and associated with “the temptation of the flesh, heresy, and death.”1 Long before they became the fantasia of fairy tales and, later, Hollywood films, mermaids made talismanic appearances in architectural decorative motifs on medieval churches and secular buildings across Europe. The fragment of a decorative relief in the Benaki Museum is a representative example of eighteenth-century architectural decoration. It portrays a bare-breasted mermaid clutching her double tail and wearing a crown (a reference to the Virgin Mary).

This Greek double-tailed mermaid closely resembles the famous eleventh-century metopes of the Modena Duomo, which were inspired by the creatures in the Liber Monstrorum. A formidable array of mermaids appears in Waliszewska’s own bestiary—perhaps unsurprisingly given the mermaid’s powerful significance in Polish folklore. The Syrenka Warszawska is a symbol of the Polish capital dating back to its origins as a fishing village, where legends recount mermaids who tempted fishermen.

Images of mermaids appear on Warsavian heraldic crests from 1390—an example from the seventeenth century depicts Warsaw’s mermaid as a woman-fish-bird, hearkening back to the layers of myth and iconography it accrued as it migrated across cultures.

In this striking green-and-red-hued canvas, Waliszewska subverts the typical image of the mermaid as an allegory of feminine power. Her recumbent mermaid appears as if she is beached, passively lying in front of a row of faceless men who sit menacingly behind her. Her human hands are missing, impeding her ability to defend herself. The unsettling power dynamic between the men and the mermaid is echoed by the painting’s sickly palette, as if the color wheel opposites of red and green are pitted against one another to mirror the gender antagonism between drunken sailors and their fantastical object of desire. In Waliszewska’s telling, the mermaid is subjected to the same threat of sexual violence that befalls moral women under patriarchy—her millennia-old magic is unable to save her.

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