There'll be gold and silver, turquoise, feathers and shells at the National Gallery of Australia this summer – and not just in the shop.
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The summer blockbuster, Gold & the Incas: Lost World of Peru, will bring to the capital all the "drama and beauty" of the famous Incan empire that most of us have only seen in films.
The first exhibition of Peruvian art ever staged in Australia will be in stark contrast to the gallery's current blockbuster, Turner from the Tate, a large-scale show of works by JMW Turner.
But gallery director Ron Radford and his team are confident the show, announced in Canberra on Friday, will have enough wow factor to bring in the summer crowds.
Made up entirely of funerary artefacts uncovered in Peru during the 20th century, the show will be "incredibly costly to exhibit, what with all that gold", Dr Radford said.
ACT Minister for Tourism Andrew Barr said the ACT government would be providing $500,000 to support the show, taken from the Special Events Fund.
"Excuse the pun, but it's a welcome injection of gold into the territory economy," he said.
"I think the diversity of shows in the centenary year is important, and they've got to mix up their exhibitions…The evidence is there that [large shows] are working for us economically, but aside from all of that, if we weren't in this space providing this support, you wouldn't get this sort of exhibition in Canberra."
Senior Curator of International Painting and Sculpture Christine Dixon said the gallery had been searching for something different to stage at the end of Canberra's Centenary year.
"The idea came because we always look for variety," she said.
"We'd been doing a lot of European paintings and works on paper shows, we'd done a lot of Asian shows, so we thought of the great civilisations of the Americas as somewhere to look at."
She said the 10 private and public collections from which the show is sourced had been generous in lending what were incredibly valuable national treasures.
The oldest piece in the show is a carved idol dating back to 1000BC.
"It goes up through various cultures to the Incas, who strangely enough, even though they're so famous, the culture only arose around 1400," she said.
"They conquered all of Peru, most of Argentina, Bolivia, and they were conquered a century later by the Spanish, so even though they're so famous – they built Machu Picchu, and all those wonderful things, they're the culmination of these great cultures that you can see here."
She said some of the items in the show had been found buried in the Paracas Caverns - cliff shafts used as tombs, in which dignitaries had been mummified in up to 60 wrappings.
"Apart from the people that have been lucky enough to go to Peru, they won't be anything that most people have seen before," she said.
"Although I love showing Turner or Monet to people, it's a new thing for us to have this. It's not familiar and it's great art, that's the thing that's so interesting about it - people think of Egyptian art, and Roman art. Like them, this is an ancient civilisation that went through changes of dynasties and epoques and cultures." Dr Radford said negotiations to stage the show had been tense, not least because Australia had to join a queue of other countries vying for the treasures.
"Germany, France and Canada and America all wanted to shows - we had to push ourselves through to the front, and get behind others, because we work on these exhibitions over a number of years," he said.
"So that was one of the challenges because there actually isn't that many works available. Those 10 museums are not that large, and they're mainly composed of things that have been found in the 20th century because so much destroyed or nicked by the Spanish.
"So what we're seeing are the very rare items, as well as the very beautiful items."
He said he was especially taken by a 1500-year-old cloak made of feathers, still intact after being preserved in a desert tomb.
"I think there's plenty of wow factor in the exhibition and certainly something that no one's ever seen before," he said.
Gold & the Incas: Lost Worlds of Peru opens at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra on December 6, and runs until April 21, 2014.