Cusop History Group
CHG Visit to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford Jan 2018.
On January 4th 2018 Cusop History Group had a brilliant day out when 12 of the Cusop History Group set out for the Ashmolean Museum. Denise who works there had kindly arranged for a behind the scenes visit to the Jameel Centre which had been specially arranged for us. We were able to look in depth and close up at some of the amazing artefacts that the museum has.
Thanks to Lesley and her Life in Hay Blog for the following description.....
"It was like the Radio 4 programme about the 100 objects from the British museum. For instance, at first glance the first object was a blue and white bowl, but Denise could tell us so much about the way the decoration told us about the fusion of Iranian and Chinese cultural ideas. This in turn demonstrated the trade routes between the two countries, and the way that the Iranians had started making blue and white pottery, been copied by the Chinese, who were able to make porcelain, and then that was copied by the Iranians, who developed their own type of pottery, fritware.
There was a tile showing two jolly chaps drinking together, intended to be a wall tile and which, linked with poetry of the period, indicated the acceptance of homosexual love in late 13th century Iran (and the figures were probably Mongols).
There was more evidence of cross-cultural connections in a page of a Koran in three languages, and a picture of a Dervish kneeling on his coat - and we were able to get right up to the objects, with magnifying glasses, to examine them.
Someone asked about the prohibition in Islam of drawing living things, so Denise explained that this was a misunderstanding - there is a tradition of figure painting running throughout Islamic art, as it is not prohibited by the Koran. However in the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet show that Mohammed didn't like figurative art, as only Allah could create life. On questions like this, the Koran takes precedence over the Hadith every time, though there were periods of iconoclasm in Islamic history.
I think my favourite picture that we were shown was the one of the Dervish leaving a palace on his white mule, in a picture crammed with detail - two scholars reading on the roof, a man picking sticks up, three women spinning at the bottom of the picture. These pictures were painted by teams of artists, with many layers of paint giving a jewel-like effect on specially burnished paper.
Then, like the court painters, we moved on to India, and saw the way the styles changed.
And finally we got to European influence on the art, finishing with a life size picture of a crane, commissioned by Lady Mary Impey to send back to England to show the different animals, birds and plants of India (and painted on English paper).
It was all absolutely fascinating, and I got the impression that Denise could have talked for the whole session on each one of the objects and their significance.
Imagining The Divine
In the afternoon we went to see the special exhibition Imagining the Divine, where Denise led us through a selection of important pieces (and some of her favourites) to explain the theme of the exhibition. It's about the way that different religions used art to show their beliefs, and how that art was influenced across different cultures and religions. For instance, the head of Jupiter in sculpture is a man with a flowing beard - which became the inspiration for Christian depictions of God the Father. Nearby is a statue of the Good Shepherd - not Jesus, but Apollo three hundred years before Jesus, with a ram slung across his shoulders.
Off in the Buddhist area, we found that the Buddha forbade any depictions of himself, and for 500 years there were no statues apart from things like his footprints, or the wheel symbol. Then Buddhists started to want to make statues - but what had the Buddha looked like? Nobody knew - but there were Jain statues of seated figures with curled hair and serene expressions that seemed to fit the bill, and that's what they adopted.
There was a picture of one of the giant sculptures of the Buddha in Afghanistan on the wall, and Denise told us that, when the Taliban blew up the figures, it was not quite the disaster it appeared. When the sculptures were made, they were intended to be seen by travellers coming up the pass (here's the importance of trade routes again), and the stone was augmented with plasterwork, and finally gilded so that the statues shone. After a thousand years of neglect, they were in pretty poor shape, and the explosions actually made it possible for archaeologists to study the way the statues had originally been put together.
Another really famous piece, in the exhibition, is the Chi Rho mosaic from Hinton St Mary - it's in many books about Roman Britain, and is supposed to be the first portrait of Christ in the British Isles - or is it? "Christ" means "the anointed one", and there was an emperor (I forget the name she gave) who used the Chi Rho symbol on his coinage, and also had a cleft chin like the portrait. So were the owners of the villa just showing their loyalty to the Emperor?
We also learned how to tell the end of each verse in the Koran (there's a circle surrounded by dots to look for) while looking at some of the most beautiful manuscripts - one was written on indigo paper, in gold.
The other religions covered in the exhibition were Judaism, and the depiction of Vishnu in Hinduism, again showing the cross-fertilisation of ideas from one religion and culture to another.
At the end of the exhibition we came to the British Isles - and I got ridiculously excited again over the slab with Pictish symbols carved on it, and the ogam incised on the edge of another slab from Wales.
I'm only scratching the surface here of the objects on display - it really was a fascinating afternoon - and the exhibition will be on until 18th February 2018, and costs £10 to get in."