Hirst has imagined the fabled shield of Achilles, lost for millennia, and invented a whole sequence of ancient currencies. Golden discs and silver tablets glow in spotlit vitrines, their inscriptions – and even the language in which they are written – mysterious. Here are hieratic stone warriors and rusting scimitars, brine-damaged sphinxes and a magnificent carving of three-headed Cerberus. Here is a sword-wielding woman mounted on a gigantic bronze bear, and a cartwheel-sized calendar stone made by the Aztecs (an anachronism which has baffled historians, according to the museum-toned captions). The joke is already more subtle than many of the objects this is art for a post-truth world. ![]() But then again, these are in a true sense buried treasures: buried and then rediscovered for the sake of this footage. One glimpse of the synthetic blue coral, or the Versace bling of the golden head gingerly dislodged from the sea floor, should give the game away, even before you see the amazing “hoard”. ![]() Inside, in perfect Discovery Channel pastiche, the tale is told of a freed slave named Cif Amotan II (solve that anagram), who accumulated an immense fortune which he spent on the sunken treasures divers are now dredging up on the screen before you. People touch it to see if the twinkling white substance is real, which it is: Carrara marble, in fact. It is both jaw-dropping and hyperbolic, with overtones of computer-generated movies. The man’s face is a terrified rictus, the horse strenuously anatomical in its every standing vein – this is the classical Laocoön statue crossed with the sculptures of Leonardo and Messerschmidt. Outside the former customs house is a lifesize statue of a man on a rearing horse, both constricted by a monumental snake. The question of belief is in the air even before you enter the Punta della Dogana.
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