NETFLIX’S star-studded film The Dig highlights the exciting discovery of a great Saxon treasure at Sutton Hoo in 1939. A few years earlier in 1932 Winchester had its own moment of excitement when excavation at Oliver s Battery unearthed one of Hampshire s finest Dark Age treasures, the Winchester hanging bowl. For many years it was held by the British Museum, but is now in the City Museum, Winchester. The full story of its discovery by a local archaeologist can be googled and read in a Hampshire Field Club journal, because virtually all its papers are now online. The bowl was found in the grave of a young man buried with a javelin and hunting sword and is decorated with red spirals and fittings in the form of aquatic birds. There are counterparts in seventh century Irish manuscripts. The archaeologist, W.J. Andrew, must have been delighted, but complained that the fabulous discovery has “almost completely obscured the original purpose of [the] tentative excavations”!
From childbirth to death, the life of the monarch at Versailles was performed in public. That is one of the reasons Marie Antoinette created a separate life in her domain of the Petit Trianon, her refuge from court protocol. With its gardens and artificial lake edged by a higgledy-piggledy thatched-roofed hamlet, Trianon was designed to allow the young queen to ‘return to nature’, its working farm and dairy providing her with wholesome opportunities to educate her children, all in the spirit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Enlightenment philosophy. Of course, though far less formal than Versailles, Trianon was nevertheless all design: its cottages’ rustic exteriors concealed richly decorated interiors in which the queen could entertain her friends. And it also contained her own private theatre. Marie Antoinette’s was an age in which ‘theatre-mania’ was rife, with small society theatres sprouting up within fashionable chateaux and stately homes. But at the same time stagecraf
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The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles challenged art lovers to post photos of themselves recreating their favourite masterpieces – including Picasso’s Dora Maar – from home earlier this year. Photo: AFP
Museum doors may be shut for the time being, but that doesn’t mean that culture has ground to a halt.
Faced with the pandemic, and in the absence of visitors, museums and cultural institutions have turned to technology to reinvent their roles and missions digitally.
Strolling alone through the Paris Louvre’s Richelieu wing, without the crowds of tourists and school trips, was a dream that was previously out of reach for most of us. unless you happen to be Beyonce.
2021: The social museum inquirer.net - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from inquirer.net Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.