By Paul Singer
The Associated Press

CLEVELAND - The statue of Zeus is a smiling ambassador of the ancients, his face still holding a painted, rosy glow despite his 2,500 years.

He was made by Greeks who had colonized southern Italy and Sicily in the seventh and eighth centuries B.C., and represents a blending of civilizations that formed the roots of modern Western culture.

The terracotta Zeus is part of "Magna Graecia," a new exhibit of ancient Greek treasures that goes on view Sunday for the first time in the United States at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The colonies that produced this Zeus came to dominate the culture of Italy, and "Magna Graecia" displays the finest examples of the remains of those early settlements.

"The Greek culture was infectious," said Michael Bennett of the Cleveland Museum of Art, co-curator of the exhibit, which he said illustrates the transfer of Greek culture from the Aegean Sea area to Italy.

The exhibit consists of 81 objects from eight archaeological museums in the region where the Greek colonies were built. Each museum houses the great finds of its locale, and the exhibit is a sampler of the finest works from each museum.

"Most of these have never been out of Italy, and none of them have ever been to America," said co-curator Aaron J. Paul of the Tampa Museum of Art, the only other stop for the exhibit in the United States.

The Greeks landed on the Italian shore and thrived, producing art in the styles and motifs of their homeland, using the local clay and stones instead of the marble that was the preferred medium back home.

There are pieces of jewelry - earrings, signet rings, necklaces - ancient bronze mirrors of stunning detail, pottery and plates, icons and statues.

But along with these traditional museum items are some extraordinary finds.

From Paestum, which is along Italy's Mediterranean coast, comes a bronze jug circa 530 B.C. in pristine condition. The handle is a slender standing lion, head and paws resting on the rim of the jug, hind legs planted on the wide shoulder of the vessel; his eyes stare intently across the wide mouth and into the contents.

This particular jug held honey, and when it was unearthed in 1954, the honey was still inside. A chunk of that petrified honey sits beside the jug in the exhibit hall.

Perhaps the rarest items of the collection are three terracotta altars from Gela, on the southern coast of Sicily.

One altar features a Gorgon Medusa, a nearly comic rendition of the snake-headed monster. A second depicts the goddess of dawn abducting the young hunter Kephalos, in an angelic pose that seems more mother and child than captor and captive.

The third altar is a pristine, 4-foot sculpture of three standing goddesses with flowing robes and hair. Above their heads is a scene of a lioness with bulging eyes attacking a bull.

The three altars were found together near the sea two years ago in exceptional condition, and have left Gela only twice before, for brief exhibitions in Rome and Paris.

The curators acknowledge that little is known about why the altars were made.

"The mainland Greeks as far as we know never created these terracotta altars," Mr. Paul said.

Ann Nicgorski, a professor art history at Willamette University in Oregon, said the art in the "Magna Graecia" exhibit is of great significance in the formative history of Western art because so much descended from it.

David Mitten, professor of classical art and archaeology at Harvard University, said one of the most important contributions of the "Magna Graecia" show is the cooperative process that created it.

"This is the first time that an exhibition in the United States has been able to pull together loans of absolute masterpieces of Greek art from several major Italian museums," said Mr. Mitten, who served as an adviser to Mr. Bennett and Mr. Paul.

"It is a pioneering effort that I hope will pave the way for more of these things," Mr. Mitten said.

Mr. Bennett and Mr. Paul acknowledge the exhibit is mostly a product of the extraordinary generosity of the lending museums, and Mario Iozzo of the Center for Conservation in Florence, who accompanied the Americans to each museum to ask for their masterpieces.

"Magna Graecia" will be on view at the Cleveland Museum Oct. 27 to Jan. 5. The exhibit is to move to the Tampa Museum of Art Feb. 2 to April 20.