Not so hidden treasure
Treasures of the Ashmolean
Ashmolean Museum, until December 2008
With half the Ashmolean’s collection festering dustily in storage due to their new building project, a trip round can feel a little disheartening. Wandering through corridors of empty vitrines one feels glad that entry is free. An unimaginative attempt has been made to remedy this situation in the form of an exhibition entitled Treasures of the Ashmolean. Doing basically exactly what it says on the tin, this show highlights various gems from the museum’s proverbial jewellery box.
A keen gallerygoer is likely to have seen most of the items on display here already, however this exhibition will serve the less devoted as a sort of Ashmolean-lite, a small, synecdochal representation of their holdings. The typological method of display is antiquated and owes much to the museological notions of General Pitt Rivers.
Unlike the Renaissance paintings and Majolica pottery that one passes on ones way to the exhibition, these objects huddle together under umbrella headings such as Religion and Crafts and Design and are treated like anthropological specimens rather than works of art.That said, some of the pieces chosen for exaltation are truly spectacular, for example the mantle of King Powhatan, father of Pocahontas, and, my personal favourite, a metrological relief from 460 BC.
The latter, depicting merely the head, pectorals and outspread arms of a muscular man, singularly encapsulates the concepts of classical art: probably designed to adorn the pediment above the entrance to a merchants shop it uses the proportions of the human body to denote ancient, standardised measurements such as a foot (29.7 cm) and a clenched fist (11 cm).
Without having read Vitruvius or knowing anything about Polykleitos’ Kanon, one can understand that this sculpture illustrates an ideal that “comes about little by little (para mikron) through many numbers”. Also included are some very pretty plates with very little intellectual substance and the Parian Marble which, as the earliest extant example of a Greek chronological table, has lots intellectual substance but looks, to the untrained eye, like a big, grey rock.
The curators of Treasures of the Ashmolean sacrifice style to content and in so doing make something of a sow’s ear out of a silk purse.
1st Jun 2006