'Troy' at the British Museum

The 'Troy' exhibition at the British Museum is closing soon so I scooted along to catch it while I still can. I've been fascinated by Troy since I was young and read Homer's 'The Iliad' in my teenage years (in translation, obviously). It's strange how that story has wound its way into our culture through art, poetry, storytelling, films and virtually every medium you can think of. A universal tale if ever there was one.

There are so many different aspects to the tale of Troy, so many different stories that there's something in there for everyone. There are love stories, tales of war and mighty warriors, jealousy, greed, power struggles, domesticity, magic and the gods, so many different angles to it that can't possibly be captured in a single exhibition. This exhibition tries to be as broad as possible and, largely succeeds.

There are three parts to the exhibition. It starts with ancient views on the Troy story as illustrated in pottery, carvings and paintings, followed by a section on the archaeology of the site in modern Turkey, and finally a view of how the story has influenced more modern culture in the last thousand years or so through books, paintings and sculptures, and, of course, films.

There were some quite astonishing paintings from Pompeii on display that re-told the tales of the old story and showed how the Romans relished the tales. The quality of the paintings is amazing and the sad thing is that we'll never know who painted them two millennia ago. I didn't notice any information about the paintings in the signage - are they frescoes or painted on dried plaster? What sort of pigments were used to create those colours?

While many of the images dealt with the big parts of the story, like the judgement of Paris or the entry of the horse into Troy, some of them picked up on the smaller aspects, like the image of Ajax and Achilles chatting over a campfire on the side of a storage jar. In a way, it's these scenes that are more interesting since they're unusual but remind us that not everything in grand tales is grand or earth-shattering, that there's a lot of waiting around. There are quiet moments amongst all the noise and rush of war and great events.

After considering how the tales of Troy were dealt with in antiquity there was a section that looked at the archeology and the fact behind the legends. There is a lot of evidence for an ancient settlement on the site thought to be Troy - quite a few settlements over the millennia - but is there evidence for a war, mass migration, Greek invasion? This section had a range of artefacts from the different cities or settlements on the site of Troy, mostly small objects that were difficult to get close to given how crowded the exhibition was.

The next section looked at the influence on art and culture of the Troy stories and legends over the last thousand years, with examples of illuminated manuscripts re-telling the story, paintings. sculptures, films and videos.

One of the earliest examples were two gorgeous panel paintings by Biaggio d'Antonio from around 1490, a Florentine artist I've not heard of before but the colours shout out Quattrocento. They're on loan from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge so I'll have to take a trip to Cambridge to see what other treasures it might have. These panels show the 'Death of Hector' and 'The Wooden Horse' so someone had obviously read Homer (or possibly, Virgil) back then to get all the details.

There's a great statue of 'The Wounded Achilles' by Filippo Albacini from 1825 on loan from Chatsworth, which is the poster boy for the exhibition.

Further along is a lovely painting by Lucas Cranach of the 'Judgement of Paris' from around 1530 on loan from the Royal Collection. We see Paris in contemporary armour as a knight as he decides which goddess is the most beautiful and it's interesting that Cranach has chosen Aphrodite as the goddess to look out at the viewer - it could have been any of them really.

There are more modern pieces of art to illustrate the continuing fascination with Troy in all it's aspects. We see William Blake's version of the 'Judgement of Paris' and George Romney's painting 'Lady Hamilton as Clytemnestra' amongst a range of Victorian paintings.

The final exhibit was a bit of a surprise, a large light installation based on light readings at the site of Troy by Spencer Finch, 'The Shield of Achilles'. I loved it!

The exhibition is only on for another week or so but, if you're patient enough to survive the inevitable crowds, it's well worth seeing.

Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum - British Museum

I went to see the latest blockbuster exhibition at the British Museum, 'Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum'. It was exceptionally busy when I went and suspect the whole run will be like that but it is definitely worth seeing if you can make it.

Of course, we all know the story of Pompeii - and therefore of Herculaneum - in that Vesuvius erupted and splurged the region in volcanic ash that covered the two cities and buried them and the people and artefacts deep in ash for nearly two thousand years. This exhibition tries to bring the old cities back to life by not just showing an array of amazing artefacts dug from the buried cities but by putting them in context. The exhibition is themed around a 'standard' Roman house of the time, placing the artefacts in and around the rooms of a typical villa.

We're given the kind of exhibits usually found in bedrooms, in kitchens and gardens. We see the frescoes, implements and furniture usually found in different rooms as well as the beautiful wall paintings decorating some rooms. Some are extensions of the spaces they represent, like the reconstruction of a garden room decorated with delicate plants and birds to take the garden into the house. We're also shown some of the statuary that might be found in a typical garden, some more salubrious than others.

There are statues, paintings and mosaics of gods and heroes, of noble men and women of Pompeii and Rome, of scholars and athletes, of Greek tales and Egyptian goddesses. They're all there somewhere. We're given statues of stags dragged down by hunting dogs, of a drunk Hercules under the influence of Bacchus and taking a leak wherever he choses just like any mortal, of Pan and a goat. This is everyday stuff for those ancient Romans, just like having the household toilet in the kitchen since it helps with kitchen waste (maybe not the best design feature of the house).

Because this is about Pompeii and Herculaneum then, of course, we have to have plaster casts of the dead folks and this was quite sad. The bodies are long gone but the space they left in the ash give us casts of the bodies of people and animals. This was rather sad, us gawping at rough casts of dead people, particularly the family group of parents and two children as we see them lying where they fell, killed by the heat and the ash, seeing the space their bodies occupied as their liquids evaporated and tendons went into spasm and we see them leaving a space of pain. I silently apologised to them for looking in at their final agonies.

The exhibition closes with the busts of a man and a woman and a quote from shortly after the catastrophy sometime in AD 90s:

"In a future generation, when crops spring up again, when this wasteland regains its green, will men believe that cities and peoples lie beneath? That in days of old their lands lay closer to the sea? Nor has that fatal summit ceased to threaten." Statius Silvae AD90s.

So soon after the eruption of AD79 the cities had vanished so completely that is was easy to believe they'd never been there. The exhibition also notes that an area of Naples used to be called Herculaneum, presumably because that's where so many refugees settled.

There was a small joy for me in the exhibition. Under one of the statues was a reference to Lucius Caecelius Iucundus, a banker of Pompeii who I was introduced to 38 years ago when I did Latin at school as part of the Cambridge syllabus. I was rubbish at Latin but I remember Caecilius and his family, his wife and children, slaves and his villa. Their world ended with the eruption and, although no-one knows whether they died in Pompeii or escaped, they live on in the Latin syllabus and in the memories of people like me. My teacher, Mr McCleod, might not have got me through the exam (more about my own laziness than anything else) but he gave me memories.

One of the most touching things in the exhibition is the portrait of the baker and his wife that forms the poster for the exhibition. Him with his rolling pin and her with her stylus. It's a touching portrait that says 'we were just like you'. The ages may pass but do we really change?

If you get the chance, go and see this exhibition. There's so much more to it than I mention here.