The British Museum
The British Museum houses a bountiful lot of Greek artifacts including the Nereid tomb (below) was the first example in architecture of a tomb-temple, a building that served both functions. It was dedicated to the water god, Nerus. The Museum also owns numerous pieces from the Greek Parthenon, something that infuriates the Greeks. But a Lord Elgin took the pieces to Britain, for safety reasons, he said, during a war when the Turks bombed Athens. However, the British government bought him off the precious stones in 1799 so now they are in the public will.
But my favorite pieces were the renderings of clothing. To make stone looks as though it were moving I think is a breathtaking skill.
Other intriguing details in the Museum include jewelry from 300 BC. The Braganza Brooch (below) depicts a man with a shield and his hunting dog at his feet. I love the ornate details and the craftmanship. It is a great funky piece of jewelry but it’s also interesting as an art object. The craftmanship that went into it is amazing: you can see the muscles on the hunter’s torso.
Amazing details from Parthenon sculptures depicting a savage centaur killing a young man. The bodies are so well contorted that you can feel the tension.
If you the British Museum only whets your appetite for art, there’s always the British Library.
The British Library is a a must if you are interested in history and literature. Entry is free. Here you get a closer look at what your 10th grade history teacher was going on about when he exulted the Magna Carta. The British Museum has one of the first copies of the famous document that sharply curtailed the powers of the King and put the Kingdom on a path toward more democratic rule.
You can glance over an essay by the illustrious and sometimes filthy-minded Freud, manuscripts from the hands of Virginia Woolf who bravely wrote as women had not dared to do. “There is no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin to say something in my own voice; and that interests so that I feel I can Go on without praise,” she wrote and may we all be grateful she did.
There is a 1304 Koran commissioned in Cairo, a 1698 Japanese book on flower arranging featuring 97 styles, an Iughur text in Sanskrit from the 10th or 11th century. The religious texts mixed in with the music books and decor manuals made me think that no matter contemporary morals might say we were never more profligate than now and we were never more holy than now. We were never more serious; we were never more frivolous. The more I look at history the more I see that everything is as old as it is young.
The thing I love most about museums and books is the power of the artist’s passion to infect me and I’m all a-frenzy with ideas and projects. That is the greatest gift of art, the power to inspire us to make our own creative contributions.
