The British Museum, which traditionally uses its summer months to display a wide-ranging, easy-to-follow main exhibition focused on a topic popular with laymen both British and from abroad (cf Pompeii and Herculaneum, Ming Dynasty China and Vikings), seems to have gone a little off-piste this year. A display, I kid you not, curated by Ian… Read More Snowflakes Beware: Review of Rodin and the art of ancient Greece at the British Museum

As a grad student, I wrote a study of the Tiberius Cup, now in the Louvre, originally found in the silver hoard of a villa at Boscoreale, near Pompeii. The cup depicts a triumph of the (future) Emperor Tiberius, and is the only known realistic depiction of this archetypal Roman event in the whole corpus… Read More Anti-clockwise; Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural at the Ashmolean Museum

In 1783, the Maltese cleric Giuseppe Vella discovered the first of a cache of documents purportedly from the period of Arab rule over Sicily (831-1072). In spite of his reticence to disclose their find-spot, and his… questionable familiarity with Arabic, his translations were wildly popular across the Italian peninsula, serving as evidence of an independent Sicilian history at just… Read More Minsogna Saracina: Storms, Wars and Shipwrecks exhibition at the Ashmolean