Ancient Greeks: Science and Wisdom

Disappointing exhibition at the Science Museum looking at how the Greeks sought to understand the world around them.

I say disappointing because it was a small show and the subject deserved a lot more space and objects. It was cleverly laid out with the subject areas based on the muses and the first object was a rather beautiful sarcophagus with the nine muses one which was projected a clever AV introduction to the show, however it all felt a bit thin.

The picture comes from a section on how Aristotle classified animals and sea creatures and comes from a wonderful selection of platters with accurate sea creatures on them. Another section looked at the idea of the ideal body  and how sculptors generated the proportions for a statute based on multiplications of the smallest joint in the little finger.

I was most interested in the section of music and how they studied the mathematics of it. It was interesting to see a pair of pipes which would have been blown simultaneously.

The show ended with a section on their understanding of the cosmos and included one of only three surviving Greek celestial globes.

Closes 5 June 2022

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