Treasures from the Ashmolean

I found the Treasures of the Ashmolean Museum exhibition to be a rewarding and interesting experience, albeit a little eclectic. This is the Ashmolean showcasing a series of its most valued artefacts, representing different human cultures, times and activities.

This exhibition promises to please a varied audience by providing over two hundred exhibits from the Ashmolean’s collections of archaeology, coins, casts and Eastern art. The ambition and scope of the presentation is very broad – to portray “artistic achievement and the development of civilisation in Europe, the Near and Far East” which originates “from four continents, the treasures represent(ing) more than thirty cultures dating from Palaeolithic times to the present day.”

If you put ambition aside, it is an ideal exhibition in which to meander among a wide selection of artefacts, categorised into nine sections of human interest and activity. Of course, the exhibition of Guy Fawkes’s lantern used on that infamous night did catch my eye. It was such a humble, unassuming, tatty relic with a magnificent story. The lantern was donated to the university in 1641 by Robert Heywood. It eventually went into the museum’s first exhibition in the late seventeenth century.

My favourites within the Treasures exhibition were varied: Powhatan’s deerskin mantle from Virginia (USA) also famously shown in the original opening of the Museum in May 1683; two of the Hercules figures, one set in plaster and one in marble; and of course, Guy Fawkes’s lantern carried with him on the night of the gunpowder plot, 5th November 1605.

The exhibition is not short of amazing artefacts and historical testimonies which would not be here today were it not for the efforts of public museums such as the Ashmolean.

James McConalogue (Unverified), 25/06/06

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