Known as one of the great heroes of the Roman Empire, Emperor Hadrian has a somewhat different reputation in Jewish historiography. While in the West, Hadrian is seen as an enlightened emperor – a gifted ruler, philosopher, and poet – in Jewish history he’s known as a harsh oppressor, one of the worst persecutors of the Jewish people. He put down the Bar Kochba revolt and annihilated the Jewish population in Judea.
In the “Historia Augusta,” a third-century text, Hadrian was described as a study in contrasts: “He was, in the same person, austere and genial, dignified and playful, dilatory and quick to act, miserly and generous, deceitful and straightforward, cruel and merciful, and always in all things changeable.”
Today, memory of him comes in two contrasting forms.
One of the most significant findings in Israeli archaeology is a bronze statue of Hadrian; it’s one of the most magnificent pieces at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. In 1975, an American tourist and antiques enthusiast discovered the statue accidentally while searching fields near Kibbutz Tirat Zvi with a metal detector.
Today, the notorious emperor can be seen at the museum in the form of another statue: a brand-new replica made of honeycomb.
Replicating the head of the sculpture for the new project at the Israel Museum, Slovakian artist Tomas Libertiny used tens of thousands of bees acting as a superorganism in a hive stationed in the museum’s sculpture garden. Apart from being an impressive artwork, it references how the original sculpture was made 1,800 years ago – through a now-lost method that uses wax.
It’s likely that during Hadrian’s reign, thousands of his likenesses in stone and bronze were scattered throughout the empire. But bronze sculptures are particularly sensitive to the effects of time. Bronze has always been in high demand, and artworks were often melted down to make weapons or other objects.
Apart from the Tirat Zvi statue, only two other bronze statues of this emperor have been found. One was rescued from the bottom of the Thames River in London, and the other was discovered in a Paris antiquities market. The one found in Israel is the most stunning and intact of the three. In 2015, at an exhibit focused on Hadrian at the Israel Museum, the three statues were displayed together for the first time.
The international airport of its time
David Mevorah is the museum’s senior curator of the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods. Over the years, he has developed a long, complicated relationship with the bronze statue. “I’ve been dealing with Hadrian since the first day I stepped foot here, 38 years ago,” he says. “He’s a wonderful opportunity to look at a historical figure and see how we fashion great historical figures in our minds.”
In recent years, Mevorah has been conducting archaeological excavations at the site where the statue was found. The site, he says, was a Roman legion’s camp and the main crossing point into the area through the Jordan River. At this base, they received the emperor on his visit; this is probably why such an ornate statue was found not in a palace or a capital city but in a field. “This was the Ben-Gurion International Airport of its time,” Mevorah says.
The bee sculpture project also involved the participation of Rami Tarif, the museum’s design and archaeology curator. Jerusalem beekeeper Rafi Nir provided and maintained the hives.
Libertiny, who developed the bee sculpture technique, says he’s been working with bees as a medium for 17 years. The inspiration for this mode of creation, he says, came from the character of Alyosha Karamazov, the youngest of the Karamazov brothers in Dostoyevsky’s classic novel.
“He’s a sensitive and vulnerable character, but he also survives unscathed,” he says. “When I looked at some beeswax, I pondered it. This is a material that is very sensitive on the one hand, but on the other, it’s used to protect furniture, shoes, and car polish. It holds a contrast between sensitivity and durability. It’s weak but strong.”
He began studying honeycombs and beekeeping. After two years, he started to develop the sculpting technique. “It’s like conducting a symphony of nature. The artist steps back. You have partial control over what happens. It’s like growing a bonsai; you clip a branch so that the energy flows elsewhere, you use nature’s power. When you’re freed from the desire to reach control and perfection, you reach wonderful places.”
Libertiny says bees “only build when they’re happy. You can cage people and threaten them and make them do things. You can’t threaten bees. They would rather die than build something they don’t want to build. So the statue is created only when the bees are happy. When they have enough food and safety. It’s a celebration of plenty. It’s like building a power turbine on a river. You’re not taking the water, it will reach the ocean eventually. You’re just using its power.”
The idea to invite Libertiny to copy Hadrian’s statue into a honeycomb was raised in a conversation between Mevorah and Tarif. “During COVID, I began to think about how to make the museum’s collection accessible to the public,” Tarif says. “David suggested that we do something with Hadrian in 3D printing. I knew Tomas’ work and said let’s try to do something that sounds crazy at first – put beehives in the museum.”
According to Mevorah, “until now, Tomas’ sculptures dealt with the form and not with the technology of creating it. In Hadrian’s case, there’s a triple connection between the ancient technology, the modern technology, and sustainability.” Indeed, the original bronze sculpture was also created with wax.
In the Roman era and thousands of years prior, sculptors used the now-forgotten wax method. In this process, the statue was first made from wax, and then molten bronze was poured into the cast through a complex process. The process allowed for the creation of detailed sculptures with delicate finishing.
The first try
The project was launched two years ago. In the first stage, Libertiny made a 3D scan of the original sculpture, from which he recreated the statue in a 3D printer as a delicate web of filaments made of medical-grade nylon, a thin yet strong plastic that preserves sterility and thus protects the beehive. Wax paper stuck to the web. Libertiny made two busts. Nir placed beehives around the museum’s sculpture garden, and in March, the first bust was put in the beehive.
Tarif constructed an expansion to the beehive where a camera was stationed, along with lighting used on a partial basis to avoid annoying the bees. The videos documenting the work of the bees are magnificent. Delicately and diligently, thousands of bees scurry around the bust, creating perfect miniature honeycomb geometrical structures.
Shortly after the bust was put in, things began to go wrong in the first beehive. The weather in Jerusalem last spring was unpredictable. Heat waves, cold snaps, and rain disrupted the activity of the beehive, and a month later, another drama took place when half the hive left as a swarm to establish a new hive.
The camera placement and lighting may have also disrupted the hive’s activity. Either way, the hardships endured by the hive left their mark on the statue. The first hive’s Hadrian looks a bit odd. The Emperor’s face was distorted, dripped, and swollen. The second bust was placed in the second hive, without cameras this time. To the surprise of all, the bees completed the statue accurately within just four days.
The statues were removed from hives before the bees had time to put honey into the combs. They are extremely delicate and impressive in their mathematical precision and their color. They are very light but sturdy. As part of the preservation process, they were placed in deep freeze for a short time, to remove concerns of infiltration of the beeswax moth, which could harm the hive. After freezing, they are strictly maintained at room temperature.
Next year they will be the center of an exhibition dedicated to them. “Hadrian’s statue has been pretty much done to death, exhibit-wise,” Tarif says. “Suddenly, you do something that adds more layers to it and can make it accessible to a new audience, children, young people, families.” The beehives, containing half a million bees, were left in the sculpture garden.
The project aligns with the urban beekeeping trend picking up steam in Jerusalem and other Israel cities. Maintaining beehives on rooftops or back yards is increasingly popular as part of a belief that the urban landscape should support life for humans, but also plants and animals. There are now beehives in the Knesset’s garden, the Jerusalem Botanical Garden, Gazelle Valley Park in Jerusalem, and the Sinsila community center in East Jerusalem.
Nir, an observant Jew who lives in Rashit, an urban kibbutz in Jerusalem's Kiryat Menachem neighborhood, had reservations about the project. “I said that if you’re going to do something like this, why Hadrian and not King David, and what about ‘Thou shalt not make any graven image’?” he says.
According to Tarif, “The main message that’s important for us to impart is that we need to aspire to a common living space predicated on balance and respect in man’s relations with nature. This work raises fundamental questions regarding the complex relationship between humans and nature and technology, and also raises questions about the place and role the museum seeks for itself in the 21st century.
"We have a fascinating platform that also makes educational content for values of sustainability accessible. There is also something beautiful about the fact that a bee flies a kilometer to a flower and comes back to the museum to create the statue. The museum has an environmental impact.”
Hadrian joins an elite club of historical figures recreated through the Libertiny method. The most famous are Queen Nefertiti of Egypt and the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Other sculptures he has created include skulls, faces, and more abstract forms. “The first few times I opened the beehive, I didn’t know if it was beautiful or ugly, because nobody had done it before. I had no frame of reference. It’s like looking at the sky – is there such a thing as an ugly sky?”
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2023-06-29 11:00:00Z
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