While the Greeks were left out of the socio-cultural rebirth that brought the European civilisation out of the Middle Ages, the uncontested contribution of Hellenic and Byzantine culture to the Renaissance is the subject of the exhibition In the Light of Apollo, open till the end of March at the National Art Gallery .

A Cultural Olympiad event, the exhibition was four years in the making, cost the government 2 million euros and showcases 500 works (valued at around 700 million euro in total) by 150 Renaissance artists. The exhibits have arrived in Greece from over 160 institutions around the globe, including the Louvre , the British Museum , New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Berlin's Gemaeldegallerie and the Fondazione di Studi di Storia dell'Arte Roberto Longhi, whose director Mina Gregori also acts as co-curator with the National Gallery’s Marina Lambraki-Plaka.

The Italian term rinascita (literally “rebirth”) was coined by the art historian Giorgio Vasari in 1550 to describe the rediscovery of the ancient Greco-Roman style of painting. Yet, Petrarch and student Boccaccio had already noted the end of a period of darkness during their own lifetime (14th century) and a rediscovery of classical Greece and Rome.

The impact of classical culture and thought on the Renaissance has been thoroughly studied by scholars over the years, but there has never been an exhibition of this magnitude dedicated to the symbolic role of ancient Greece. That’s why In the Light of Apollo is characterized by Lambraki-Plaka as “a school of self-knowledge.” Actually, the stated goal of this exhibition is to heighten awareness of the fact that “the course of Hellenism, disrupted by the Fall of Constantinople, made its way into the Italian Renaissance.”

Enter the big masters
The exhibition is organised into fifteen units, documenting the course of rebirth thematically (with the reappearance of Greek mythology), stylistically (naturalism as a way of expressing the anthropocentric cosmology of the time), and also geographically, as separate sections focus on the “Greek-style” sculptures and paintings found in Veneto , Mantua and Lombardy , regions which developed their own distinctive style.

Ancient Greek figures and myths (Bacchus and Ariadne, Apollo and Daphne, Thesseus and the Minotaur, Apollo and Hercules) abound in the paintings of Renaissance artists and are often used allegorically. Venus (Aphrodite) is most popular, as seen in Botticelli’s Venus, Veronese’s Mars and Venus and Titian’s Venus Delighting Herself with Love and Music. Tintoretto and Mantegna are also showcased.

Drawings by Raphael , da Vinci Michelangelo and Benozzo Gozzoli are also on show, as are those of Pisanello and Jacopo Bellini. The Venetian artist’s two books of drawings—one owned by the Louvre, the other by the British Museum—are deemed more important than his paintings.

Lorenzo Ghiberti’s awesome Gates of Paradise, created for the cathedral of Florence, is considered to be one of the greatest masterpieces of 15th century Italian Renaissance. A panel of the work, included in the exhibit, was transported in nitrogen cases to prevent the wear of their famous gilded bronze relief. Sculptures by Donatello, Antonio Pollaiuolo, Tullio Lombardo, Rosselino, Luca della Robbia and Guglielmo Fiammingo are also exhibited. In another unit, focus is drawn to archaeological discoveries that took place during the Renaissance, such as the Apollo Belvedere found in the late 15th century.

A historical dialogue, as it were, is set up within gallery walls with Renaissance works of art linked to their Greek prototype or muse: a Hellenistic horse head is exhibited next to a similar bronze sculpture attributed to Donatello ; a Corinthian helmet from ancient Chalki is exhibited with military daggers and helmets dating to 15th-16th centuries; and the winged putti and animal figures in Raphael’s religious painting The Vision of Prophet Ezekiel (which depicts Zeus escorted to the heavens) are recognisable from Roman plaques dating back to the 1st and 2nd century BC.

Illustrated manuscripts of ancient Greek texts and portraits of Greek authors, such as Botticelli’s difficult to recruit portrait of Michael Maroullos Tarchaniotis (born in Constantinople in 1453 to parents from the Peloponnese , he studied literature and philosophy in Padua and Venice). A unit is dedicated to the Medici’s as collectors and their role in the rebirth of antiquity and the revival of Neoplatonism.

There are hope chests and birth trays decorated with images inspired by the Greek history, mythology and literature and even an ecclesiastical candelabrum with seven branches made for the Pistoia Cathedral by Donatello's friend Maso di Bartolomeo. A section is also dedicated to humanist statesman Palla Strozzi’s Neoatticism and the depiction of the Apollonian and Dionysian aspects of ancient Greece in the Florentine works.