'Scenes from the Stone Age: The cave paintings of Lascaux' in Geneva

A major exhibition dedicated to the masterpieces of Lascaux will be held this autumn in Geneva. The diversity and quality of its Palaeolithic artwork have made this cave – now a UNESCO World Heritage site – one of the most important of its kind in the world. The life-size replicas of the frescoes, specially commissioned for the touring exhibition, will allow visitors to grasp the splendour of the Lascaux cave, closed to the public since 1963. For its first installation in Switzerland, the public will be able to discover this interactive exhibition at Palexpo from 2 October 2015 to 17 January 2016. Tickets will be on sale from 26 June 2015 on the Ticketcorner and FNAC networks.

The animals represented on the walls of the cave at Lascaux are famous all over the world. Deer, horses, aurochs, bison… Their colours and mystery fascinate us and question our origins. Discovered in 1940, these wall paintings are considered to be treasures of Palaeolithic art and attracted crowds of visitors. Victim of its own success, the site in the South-West of France was closed to the public in 1963 in order to preserve the frescoes, rendered vulnerable by the passage of hundreds of thousands of visitors. UNESCO included the cave at Lascaux in its list of World Heritage sites in 1979. The General Council of Dordogne, initiators of the project Lascaux – International Exhibition, decided thirty years later to allow one of the world’s most famous decorated caves to leave its site in the Perigord and present it beyond the frontiers of France in a remarkable touring exhibition.

The exhibition will be presented for the first time in Switzerland. Reproduced in their minutest details, the life-size replicas of the paintings from this fabulous cave will reveal the secrets of the masterpieces painted by our CroMagnon ancestors nearly 200 centuries ago.

An interactive history of Lascaux

The exhibition extends over a surface of almost 4000 square meters and tells the story of the cave. It starts with the incredible adventure of the four boys who discovered Lascaux in 1940. A 3D film projected on a giant screen and models of the cave’s various galleries will help visitors to understand the structure of the underground halls. The high point of the visit: the replicas of the paintings in the Nave and the Well Scene.

The rest of the exhibition deals with the mysteries of Lascaux. Tactile screens and a film allow the public to grasp the details of the frescoes and reveal some of its secrets. On an animated wall, worldrenowned specialists, painters, scientists and philosophers, will deliver their testimonies.

Five extraordinary scenes

The scenes represented in the exhibition are mostly taken from the Nave gallery, the longest decorated part of the cave. It houses the frieze of the ibex, visible when the wall is plunged in darkness, the Swimming Stags Frieze, whose delicate and majestic heads seem to emerge from the water, the celebrated Crossed Bison Panel, and the Black Cow frieze, whose enormous belly hides a herd of horses. The Well scene is also reproduced: it is here that the only human figure represented at Lascaux can be found, grappling with a mortally wounded bull.

All the paintings have been reproduced in their actual size, faithful in every detail to the originals. The painters used natural pigments. Using a patented technique called “stone veil”, the walls on which this amazing bestiary takes form have been reproduced in a manner that allows the recreation of the exact volumes with which humanity’s first artists worked.

Collaboration with local museums

The exhibition in Geneva will be further enriched by the contributions of the Natural History Museum and the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire. Visitors will thus be able to discover a Cro-Magnon camp, recreated with astonishing realism, and wonder at the prehistoric discoveries from the Veyrier site.

Voted best “Touring Exhibition of the Year” in 2013, the exhibition dedicated to the marvels of Lascaux has already won over the United States and Canada. It will be stopping in Geneva this autumn before setting out to conquer Asia.

The international exhibition Scenes from the Stone Age: The cave paintings of LASCAUX will be shown at the Palexpo Halle 7, Geneva, from 2 October 2015 to 17 January 2016.

Source: Palexpo [August 18, 2015]

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'Gifts for the Gods: Animal Mummies Revealed' at Manchester Museum

This fascinating exhibition will present and explore ancient Egyptian animal mummies, prepared in their millions as votive offerings to the gods. Gifts for the Gods will explain the background behind this religious practice in the context of life in ancient Egypt and the environment in which the animals lived. It will explore the British fascination with Egypt, the discovery of animal mummies by British excavators, and how the mummies ended up in the UK, as well as taking a look at the history and future of their scientific study in Manchester. The display will combine mummified specimens such as jackals, crocodiles, cats and birds with cultural artefacts such as stone sculpture and bronze statuettes, alongside 19th Century works of art and never-seen-before archives.

Millions of animals were mummified by the ancient Egyptians, 
such as this cat, which now sits in the British Museum 
[Credit: MykReeve/Flickr]

The exhibition will open with a reconstruction of the ancient Egyptian landscape which shows Egypt not as the desert we now imagine, but as a country of lush grassland, with taxidermy specimens showing what the animals would have looked like when alive.  Egypt’s many gods could take animal forms to express their superhuman nature. The exhibition explores how images of animals – pictures, statuettes or mummies – could be used to communicate with the gods. Animal mummies and bronzes statuettes are the most common votive offerings – gifts to the gods.

The exhibition will include a recreation of a subterranean animal catacomb, creating an immersive and atmospheric experience for the visitor with a dark, narrow room lined with pots containing votive animal mummies, centred on a focal point for worship.

The British were fascinated by a ‘romantic’ concept of ancient Egypt, highlighted in the exhibition by 19th Century paintings of how animal mummies were perceived by British Victorians. They were intrigued by the mysteries of the animal mummies; alongside the pyramids of Giza, one of the main tourist attractions in Egypt during the 18th and 19th centuries was the ‘Tombs of the Birds’, a catacomb at the site of Saqqara, subsequently lost and only re-identified in the 1960s by a British team.

Photographs, archive material and travel journals will show how the animal mummies were excavated and selected by archaeologists and museum experts, including how they were collected and distributed as curios and souvenirs. The study of animal mummies is a relatively new field of research, and more recent excavations are featured, in particular at Saqqara.

From bandaged crocodiles to cats entombed in wooden effigies, the new exhibition 
seeks to unravel the mystery of animal mummies. The Gifts for the Gods exhibition 
at Manchester Museum will explain the background behind what today seems 
like a bizarre religious practice, in the context of life in Egypt
 [Credit: Manchester Museum]

A section on the scientific study of animal mummies highlights the importance of the University of Manchester’s research in this area, and more broadly, how Britain has contributed to this study. Using wrapped, partially wrapped and completely unwrapped animal mummies from a variety of UK collections, the exhibition will look at the use of imaging (photography, radiography, CT, light microscopy) to learn more about the subject.

The Ancient Egyptian Animal Bio Bank Project based at the University of Manchester, and conducted by Dr. Stephanie Atherton-Woolham and Dr Lidija McKnight aims to catalogue consistent data from animal mummies in museum collections outside Egypt. Currently, this includes over 800 individual animal mummies from collections in Britain, Europe and the United States.

The exhibition will open at Manchester Museum (October 2015-April 2016) before being displayed at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow (May-September 2016) and World Museum, Liverpool (October 2016-March 2017).

Dr Lidija McKnight, Research Associate, the Ancient Egyptian Bio Bank Project said, “This exhibition will showcase the role played by the British in the discovery, excavation, collection, curation and scientific research of this understudied subject. The University of Manchester, with its long history in Egyptian mummy research, is leading the field; helping to shed light on the material remains of this ancient practice and, hopefully, to reveal more about how and why these animal mummies were produced.”

Dr Campbell Price, Curator of Egypt and Sudan, Manchester Museum said, “We are excited as this is the first exhibition on animal mummies to be held in the UK, and offers the chance to reunite mummified material from different archaeological sites for the first time in over a century. It will feature over 60 mummies, including many never before seen on public display. We are extremely pleased to be able to tour this Manchester-based exhibition to partner institutions. We expect the exhibition to be very popular at Manchester Museum, and look forward to enabling more visitors to share in this exciting subject.”

Source: The Manchester Museum [August 15, 2015]

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'Celts: Art and Identity' at the British Museum

'Celts: art and identity' opens at the British Museum on 24 September and will draw on the latest research from Britain, Ireland and Western Europe. The exhibition will tell the story of the different peoples who have used or been given the name ‘Celts’ through the stunning art objects that they made, including intricately decorated jewellery, highly stylised objects of religious devotion, and the decorative arts of the late 19th century which were inspired by the past. The exhibition will then open at the National Museum Scotland in March 2016. As part of the National Programme activity around the Celts exhibition, the British Museum and National Museums Scotland will showcase two rare Iron Age mirrors as a Spotlight tour to partner museums across the UK.

Gundestrup Cauldron (detail), Silver, Gundestrup, northern Denmark, 100 BC–AD 1 
[Credit: © The National Museum of Denmark]

Today the word ‘Celtic’ is associated with the distinctive cultures, languages, music and traditions of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany and the Isle of Man. Yet the name Celts was first recorded thousands of years earlier, around 500 BC, when the ancient Greeks used it to refer to peoples living across a broad swathe of Europe north of the Alps. The Greeks saw these outsiders as barbarians, far removed from the civilised world of the Mediterranean. They left no written records of their own, but today archaeology is revealing new insights into how they lived. Modern research suggests that these were disparate groups rather than a single people, linked by their unique stylised art. This set them apart from the classical world, but their technological accomplishments stand on a par with the finest achievements of Greek and Roman artists.

Double-faced horned Iron Age statue, perhaps representing a god. Holzgerlingen, 
Germany, 4th–2nd century BC [© P Frankenstein/H Zwietasch, 
Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart]

A stunning example in the exhibition, from National Museums Scotland, is a hoard of gold torcs found at Blair Drummond in Stirling in 2009 by a metal detectorist on his very first outing. Excavations showed they had been buried inside a timber building, probably a shrine, in an isolated, wet location. These four torcs made between 300–100 BC show widespread connections across Iron Age Europe. Two are made from spiralling gold ribbons, a style characteristic of Scotland and Ireland. Another is a style found in south-western France although analysis of the Blair Drummond gold suggests it was made locally based on French styles. The final torc is a mixture of Iron Age details with embellishments on the terminals typical of Mediterranean workshops. It shows technological skill, a familiarity with exotic styles, and connections to a craftworker or workshop with the expertise to make such an object. The Blair Drummond find brings together the local and the highly exotic in one hoard.

The Great Torc from Snettisham. Iron Age, about 75 BC. Found at Ken Hill, 
Snettisham, Norfolk, England [Credit: © The British Museum]

Although Britain and Ireland were never explicitly referred to as Celtic by the Greeks and Romans, some 2,000 years ago these islands were part of a world of related art, values, languages and beliefs which stretched from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. During the Roman period and after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, communities in Ireland and northern and western Britain developed distinct identities. The art and objects which they made expressed first their difference to the Romans, but later the new realities of living in a conquered land or on the edges of the Roman world. These communities were among the first in Britain to become Christian, and missionaries from the north and west helped to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons.

St John's Rinnagan crucifixion plaque, AD 700–800 
[© National Museum of Ireland]

The exhibition will include iron hand-bells used to call the faithful to prayer, elaborately illustrated gospel books telling the story of Jesus’s life, and beautifully carved stone crosses that stood as beacons of belief in the landscape. An exceptionally rare gilded bronze processional cross from Tully Lough, Ireland (AD 700-800), will be displayed in Britain for the first time. Used during ceremonies and as a mobile symbol of Christianity, the design of this hand-held cross may have inspired some stone crosses, but metal examples rarely survive. Its decorative plates show the wider artistic connections of its makers: three-legged swirls and crescent shapes owe much to earlier Celtic traditions; other geometric motifs echo Roman designs, while interlace designs were popular across Europe and probably inspired by Anglo-Saxon art.

The name Celts had fallen out of use after the Roman period, but it was rediscovered during the Renaissance. From the sixteenth century it became increasingly used as shorthand for the pre-Roman peoples of Western Europe. In the early 1700s, the languages of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany and the Isle of Man were given the name ‘Celtic’, based on the name used by the Greeks and Romans 2000 years before. In the context of a continually shifting political and religious landscape, ‘Celtic’ acquired a new significance as the peoples of these Atlantic regions sought to affirm their difference and independence from their French and English neighbours, drawing on long histories of distinctive local identities. First used by the ancient Greeks as a way to label outsiders, the word ‘Celtic’ was now proudly embraced to express a sense of shared ancestry and heritage.

Hunterston brooch Silver, gold and amber Hunterston, south-west Scotland, AD 700–800 
[Credit: © National Museums Scotland]

Over the following centuries, the Celtic revival movement led to the creation of a re-imagined, romanticised Celtic past, expressed in art and literature such as the painting ‘The Druids: Bringing in the Mistletoe’ by George Henry and Edward Atkinson Hornel, 1890. Druids emerge from a grove of oaks where they have been ceremonially gathering mistletoe in this romantic Victorian reimagining of a scene described by Roman author Pliny the Elder. In an attempt to evoke an authentic Scottish past, the artists incorporated things that they thought of as Celtic: spiral motifs, the brilliant colours of illuminated manuscripts and a snake design inspired by Pictish stones. The painters claimed the faces were based on ancient ‘druid’ skulls. But the features of the central druid were really inspired by photographs of Native Americans.

Gundestrup Cauldron, Silver - Gundestrup, northern Denmark, 100 BC–AD 1
[Credit: © The National Museum of Denmark]

Today, the word Celtic continues to have a powerful resonance. It calls to mind the ever shifting relationships between the different nations that make up Britain and Ireland, and their diaspora communities around the world. The idea of the Celts also confronts us with the long history of interaction between Britain and the rest of Europe.

Romano-British bronze and enamel pan with the names of forts along Hadrian’s Wall. 
Staffordshire Moorlands, England, c. AD 150. Bronze, enamel. Jointly owned 
by the British Museum, Tullie House Museum and Stoke Potteries 
[Credit: © The British Museum]

Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum said “the word Celtic brings together a series of moments across the history of western Europe when particular communities made art and objects that reflect a different, non-Mediterranean, way of thinking about the world. New research is challenging our preconception of the Celts as a single people, revealing the complex story of how this name has been used and appropriated over the last 2,500 years. While the Celts are not a distinct race or genetic group that can be traced through time, the word ‘Celtic’ still resonates powerfully today, all the more so because it has been continually redefined to echo contemporary concerns over politics, religion and identity.”

St Chad gospels Vellum AD 700–800. Used by permission of the 
Chapter of Lichfield Cathedral [Credit: © The British Museum]

Gordon Rintoul, National Museums Scotland Director said “Encompassing the latest research from across Europe the exhibition explores the history of the peoples who became known as Celts and examines the powerful objects created and used by them. I am delighted that this collaboration with the British Museum has allowed us to present a stronger, more rounded exhibition than either of the institutions could have achieved on their own. I am sure that audiences in Edinburgh and London will find much to engage, enthuse and inspire them.”

Source: The British Museum [August 14, 2015]

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