My favourite statute at the British Museum.
This is a statue of Ganymede (Roman copy of Greek original).
Ganymede was a Greco-Romano coda or symbol of same-sex attraction in classical mythology and art. (Technically, not "homosexuality" as we understand it today.)
But, I like to us gays represented, and looking gorgeous. đ
I came across this beautiful encyclopedia by Bernard de Montfaucon at the BM.
It was lent to the British Museum by the House of Commons Library.
It’s quite famous scholarly work: L’AntiquitĂ© expliquĂ©e et reprĂ©sentĂ©e en figures.
Written in French, and surprisingly, it can still be read - even by me with my so-so French.
What is remarkable is that Montfaucon, a Benedictine monk, meticulously gathered thousands of images of classical antiquities from private collections all across Europe, and categorised them systematically. Many of these artifacts he documented have since been lost or destroyed, so we owe him a debt of gratitude.
Montfaucon’s engravings on the right refer to statutes he found on the mystery cult of Sabazios of the Roman Empire.
The bronze hands were probably left standing upright on an altar in a temple as a permanent votive asking the god Sabazios for protection or thanking him for a blessing.
An exquisite object I came across at the British Museum.
This monument was for personal religious devotion. From 1792BC–1750BC.
Ancient Mesopotamians hammer-and-chiseled it. A terrific level of craftsmanship.
The figure on the left is King Hammurabi himself, shown in a classic profile with his right hand raised in a gesture of prayer or worship.
The Code of Hammurabi is one of the oldest written sets of laws in human history. King Hammurabi is shown receiving laws from the sun god Shamash. It is now in the Louvre Museum, Paris. (I have been twice, and have missed IT on both occasions — too focused on the art! đ)
The British Museum has some of the most exquisite collections of Ancient art.
The chapel-tomb of Nebamun is a masterpiece.
Nebamun was an ancient Egyptian official and scribe. Today, he is famous for the incredible discovery of the richly decorated - and now lost - Tomb of Nebamun in Thebes. The tomb’s walls were covered with high-quality fresco paintings considered by scholars to be the chef-d’oeuvre of ancient Egyptian art.
The paintings are incredible, especially when you realise they were painted around 1350 BC - making it over 3,370 years old! đ
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So beautiful.
Nebamun is depicted hunting in the marshes, powerful and strong. In his small raft, with his wife Hatshepsut next to him, and their young daughter holding onto him.
What marks this art as remarkable is its move away from rigid formal stylised depictions of the Old Kingdom to more lifelike and sensory art.
The ginger cat catching three birds at once in the papyrus thicket is iconic.
It reminds me of modern art.
As the British Museum notes:
Fertile marshes were a place of rebirth and eroticism, making this more than a simple image of recreation. The huge striding figure of Nebamun dominates, forever happy and forever young, surrounded by the rich and teening life of the marsh. Hunting not only supplied food but represented Nebamun’s triumph over the forces of chaos.
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This scene shows an official inspecting fields.
Nebamun was the accountant in charge of grain at the great Temple of Amun at Thebes (Karnak).
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Nebamun’s garden in the afterlife is like his beautiful earthly gardens of ancient Egypt.
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A procession of servants bringing food offerings for Nebamun: grain and desert animals.
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This painting displays a massive lavish pile of food meant to sustain Nebamun in the afterlife.
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Entire painting dedicated to a lively gathering in honor of Nebamun. His friends and family being served wine and entertained.
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More Information:
I was treating myself at the British Museum.
I like this photo. đ
I saw this terrific Moai statue at the British Museum.
This one is known as Hoa Hakananai'a. What is striking is its massive scale. Stoic and powerful.
These are massive human figures carved from volcanic tuff by the Rapa Nui people on Easter Island (Island of Chile) between roughly 1250 and 1500 AD.
This Moai was carved from a dense hard basalt! Incredible.
Last year, I went to an exhibition at the British Museum, and saw the Epifania cartoon by Michelangelo.
I wanted to share this on my blog for some time.
It’s easy to forget that “cartoon” in the Renaissance sense refers to a massive full-scale preparatory drawing rather than a sketch. At 2 meters, the Epifania is one of the few large-scale works on paper by Michelangelo that has survived into our modern age.
It underwent a major conservation:
Tears in the fragile paper have been mended, while discoloured areas have been tended, enabling details of the master’s original vision in black chalk and charcoal to be seen with new clarity.
Sarah Vowles, the British Museum’s curator of Italian and French prints and drawings, told The Telegraph: “Some of the chalk lines are so much crisper than they were before. You can get a sense of the power and the drama of the way that Michelangelo draws these lines. Details of some of the figures - the Christ Child’s toes, for example - are much more visible now than they were before. This is one of our most incredible drawings.”
The drawing was made of 26 sheets that had been glued together. It is a “cartoon”, a term derived from the Italian for a large piece of paper - “cartone” - meaning that it was drawn to the scale of a planned painting, although this one was apparently unexecuted.
It depicts the Virgin Mary, Christ Child and St John the Baptist. The man to her left, whom she gently pushes away (v. strange?), is likely St. Joseph (wiki).
Michelangelo created the cartoon for his friend and biographer, the artist Ascanio Condivi. He then began a painting based on the cartoon, but left it unfinished:
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| The Condivi version. |
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I want to share photos from my recent trip to the British Museum.
Pottery was a significant part of ancient Greek life. They’re also exquisite.
Fired reddish clay (known as terracotta) was mostly used to make post, cups and vases of a variety of shapes and sizes. They were used for everyday storage of wines, oils etc. but they were also used for special celebrations (and thus decorated with beautiful paintings). There is so few classical paintings from Ancient Greece that historians have had to rely on vase decorations to trace styles and techniques of the ancient world.
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The original Corinthian Geometric vases (c. 900–725 BC) were dominated by geometric motifs, e.g. meanders, zigzags etc and imitated those of Athens. Humans and animals, if they appear, are highly stylised and reduced to simple geometric shapes.
Afterwards, the Protocorinthian Vases (c. 725–600 BC) became stylised by oriental motifs through trade with the East. Thus, the geometric patterns gave way to friezes of real and fantastical animals and elaborate floral motifs. This period is focal to the development of the black-figure technique of Greek vase painting.
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I’m posting about this because the Bayeux Tapestry are returning to the British Museum.
Very exciting.
As Alastair Sooke writes in “The Bayeux Tapestry is coming home – this is a huge moment in our cultural history” (Telegraph)
Some works of art are so famous that they’re seared in the collective imagination, as familiar to us as our parents’ faces. One such piece is that 224ft-long embroidered strip of linen known as the Bayeux Tapestry, which, as almost every British schoolchild could tell you, memorialises the Battle of Hastings, as well as the events leading up to it, and the Norman Conquest of 1066.
For centuries, it has been a cornerstone of European culture – much parodied (including by The Simpsons) and still a source of inspiration for contemporary artists such as David Hockney, whose current retrospective in Paris includes a homage to it set, appropriately, within the grounds of his half-timbered Normandy property. Prior to today’s announcement that, in a reciprocal deal with the French, it will be lent to Britain – in exchange for the British Museum’s Lewis chessmen and Anglo-Saxon treasures from Sutton Hoo – it was still generating headlines as recently as this spring, when a debate broke out among medieval historians regarding the number of penises depicted within it. The jury’s still out on whether there are 93 (88 of them equine) or 94.
Although the wall hanging, which consists of nine conjoined panels, was almost certainly produced in England (probably, according to stylistic evidence, towards the end of the 11th century), it is housed, today, in Normandy’s purpose-built Bayeux Museum. (There’s also a full-size replica in Reading.) The prospect of its imminent display in Britain provides an opportunity to remove the encrustation of familiarity that, in a sense, obscures it.
For, while the tapestry has long been considered an important primary source for English history, and a sort of visual glossary documenting life in early medieval Europe (teeming with depictions of astonishingly diverse objects, including harrows and hunting horns, biers, barrels, wagons and spades), what sometimes gets forgotten is that it’s also a superb example of secular Romanesque art. It was likely commissioned by the Norman nobleman, and King William the Conqueror’s half-brother, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux (in the accounts of whose church, Bayeux Cathedral, it was first mentioned, during the 15th century).
Whoever designed the tapestry was an artist of considerable imaginative power, capable of summoning a remarkably consistent and lively extended narrative. The tumultuous, topsy-turvy battle scenes, in particular – with their chainmail-clad warriors and upended horses, and, of course, Harold, identified (like the work’s other figures) by an inscription, possibly tugging at an arrow that may be protruding from his eye – are unforgettably dynamic.
The action, though, is rarely illegible, in part because the background isn’t embroidered with coloured woollen yarns (technically, the Bayeux Tapestry, a few scenes of which are lost, is an embroidery), so that the graphic immediacy of the design within this broad central section is not diluted; text, mostly in square capitals, helps to clarify and drive the narrative, too. Everything is represented using a palette of only 10 shades of dye derived from plants including madder and woad. At one point, Halley’s Comet makes a cameo.
The middle zone, where the cut-and-thrust of the story (itself, divided into discrete scenes) takes place, is mostly flanked, at top and bottom, by decorative borders or bands. Sometimes, these borders serve a simple ornamental purpose, or represent tales from, say, Aesop’s fables. But they can also interact with, and even foreshadow, aspects of the principal story, in a manner that attests to the sophistication of the tapestry’s maker and its audience.
This, as much as the surprising fact of its survival, imbues it with a miraculous aura. That something so fundamental to our national story is, as it were, coming home – possibly after more than nine centuries! – is a massive moment for this country.
