Cathy's Art Diary

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. ...

Fabulous ten week course at the Victoria and Albert Museum on classicism looking both at its roots in the ancient world and how later generations used and developed it. I have been meaning to do a V&A course for ages but, as they are quite long, I don’t get a chance as usually one holiday or another breaks into them. However this Autumn I was grounded after Italy in the summer so I took the opportunity to do this and it was great! While in Rome I’d become fascinated by the ancients remains there and what different artists would have seen at various periods of art history so this was just the course I was looking for. We had some excellent speakers. I’d heard David Bellingham before at the National Gallery and he is a very engaging speaker. I was impressed by the range of dates he could talk about doing talks on Roman emperors and how they showed their power, how Renaissance artists used classical sculpture, a detailed look at Botticelli’s Venus and Mars and then reappe...

Beautiful exhibition at the British Museum looking at the human body in Greek art. The first room was quite bare except for the stars of the show. Three fabulous statues by famous students of Ageladas as well as recently found bronze of an wrestler cleaning themselves after a fight. I had been to a lecture by one of the curators just before I went round and she had talked about the contrast in tension which made a great statue with the whole thing being about balance and contrast between tense and relaxed muscles. All of these were perfect examples. This was a beautifully presented exhibition and I liked the way it used some of the Elgin marbles putting them back into the context in which they were made. It was interesting to see a room about how the figures would have been coloured. They look so garish to our eyes. I prefer them plain but then I have a hardened old Western art historic eye! There was an interesting section on drapery. Apart from statues of Venus wome...

Lovely exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum looking at artefacts from the royal burial tombs and the palace of Aegae, the ancient capital of Macedon. It focused on the Temenid kings including Philip II and Alexander the Great and included new finds from recent excavations. I must admit in the first room I was feeling a bit despondent as it seemed to be full of rusty spears and just one gold crown however as you moved into the other rooms you realised this was just the early pieces. The second rooms was full of the most wonderful jewellery with the end display showing the complete jewellery from 5 women’s tombs displayed on Perspex bodies to show where the items would have been worn. This was stunning and really brought the pieces to life. The last room looked at life at court in particular the role of the banquet and included wonderful sets of eating vessels. This was a period and civilisation I knew nothing about but will now look out for following this eye opening exhibition. Reviews ...

Lecture at the National Galley given by Jan Stubbe Ostergaard from the NY Carlesbergy Glyploteh gallery in Copenhagen. This was part of a series of lectures to compliment the “ Sacred made real ” exhibition. This one looked at the evidence for use of colour in Greek and Roman statues and was fascinating. It was really interesting to see the surface of sculptures magnified 40 times and showing signs of the original colour. It talked about how ingrained in later Western art is the ideal of the white classical sculpture and how wrong that image is.