A baby crawls forward on stout little arms and legs. Head up, it aims for the future, light catching its plucky face and plump ears. It is a figure so instantly recognisable as to exist outside time, speaking directly to our present moment. Yet it is more than 3,000 years old.
It is also tiny, no bigger than the palm of your hand, its charm cast in black copper alloy on a miniature scale. Nothing like it has ever been found from the Minoan era in which it was made, or the place where it was discovered – the mysterious subterranean Psychro Cave on the island of Crete.
This spellbinding sculpture is one of more than 200 works of art from the three largest Mediterranean islands of Cyprus, Sardinia and Crete, now on show in Islanders at the Fitzwilliam Museum. Many have never been seen in this country before. To say that they are revelatory would be an understatement; I have scarcely seen anything like them before.
A mother cradles an infant on her lap, one arm tenderly around its naked body, the other raised as if in greeting. They are only four inches high but powerfully moving. Might the child be dead, the caption asks of this iron age sculpture, wondering whether it is some kind of votive offering. But the infant’s enquiring eyes seem open, and there is the hint of a family resemblance, as if the artist was working on a portrait.
The first object you see is an exquisite bronze ship, no bigger than a toy, its mast topped with a heraldic bird, its prow the elongated head of an ox, found in southern Sardinia in the 19th century. It stands as an emblem of the many thousands of voyages circling around these islands on the shining Mediterranean. In the glass case behind it, a small sailor appears to salute: talisman of these seafaring people.
The sheer expressiveness of all these figures astounds. Bronze hands discovered in the bottom of a Sardinian lagoon gesture and turn, making their eloquent points with inflected fingers. You can even read the lifelines inside one palm. The faces are exceptional – a winking clay actor, an eager young bull, a superbly sculpted young soldier, half smiling, from the ancient city of Salamis on Cyprus, 750BC.
Cyprus had its own terracotta army, warriors riding into the dawn on horse-drawn chariots, discovered by a Swedish expedition excavating a sanctuary on the north-west of the island in 1929. Only a little further along the coast, a 20th-century farmer discovered the lifesize marble figure of Aphrodite in a field, hair rippling down her graceful shoulders in watery tresses, ancient Greek prototype for Botticelli’s wave-born Venus.
The show spans thousands of years, from neolithic Crete to Roman period Sardinia. The earliest object here is a torso of twinkling stone from 9000BC, which appears to have both male and female attributes (look out, too, for a terracotta centaur with breasts). The latest is a Roman statue of Dionysus, cloak flung over one shoulder, from the gymnasium at Salamis, its pose so standardised as to highlight the absolute strangeness of everything else around it.
A single perfectly formed diorite egg is so ancient we don’t know quite what it is, or what it was made for – a burnishing tool, or a beautiful sculpture in its own right, depiction of life’s source in its most concentrated abstract form? A staggering chunk of grey limestone, the size and shape of a dolphin’s fin, is carved with the outline of just such a creature swimming buoyantly along. Surely the stone, formed by nature, suggested the image created by the human being, an act of pure poetry.
An iron archer raises his tremulous bow: a diminutive Giacometti. You will see Picasso and Brancusi at every turn and the origins of modern sculpture millennia in advance. Even the most everyday objects found in the ground, and perhaps once traded back and forth between islands, startle the mind and eyes. A sleek cup with the most ideal of proportions is painted with abstract designs so subtle you would struggle to find them anywhere in the Mediterranean now. A yellow-gold ring bears a microscopic relief of Eros flying through the skies. What could it have meant to wear such an image on your finger?
The staging of this show is unusually empathic. Slender Minoan daggers are laid out like a fleet of long boats on the ocean. Objects are presented on sea-blue surfaces, waves of white gauze unfurl through the galleries, and the smallest of exhibits are displayed in twos or threes, grouped according to their family affinities, and with plenty of space. Some are in low glass cases, so that you can kneel down to examine their undersides, as if coming across them on a beach.
And here you discover, again and again, the movement of waves that undulates all through the show: incisions cut in stones, waves on clay and iridescent glass, circling tides that shape the form and rhythm of what you see. Towards the end is a vast terracotta vessel for the remains of the dead, fitted with handles for those who bore it, in the shape of an oval. You are right back to the boat and the diorite egg. This is an art of extraordinary intimacy, of family, friendship and humanity, shaped by the sea-swept life of the islands and the never-ending rhythm of the waves.
Islanders: The Making of the Mediterranean is at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until 4 June
