Launch of a new Ure Museum exhibition

We are delighted to announce a new exhibition— Locus Ludi: Anyone can play!on display at the Ure Museum from 6 September until 30 November, 2023. Image of ancient game pieces from the Ure Museum
This new exhibition, inspired by the European Research Council funded project Locus Ludi: The Cultural Fabric of Play and Games in Classical Antiquity, led by Professor Véronique Dasen, is an opportunity to explore the rich collections relating to games and play in antiquity that are available not only at the Ure Museum but at other UK museums. The exhibition is co-curated by Jayne Holly (Ure Assistant Curator) and Summer Courts (one of our PhD candidates) and benefits particularly from Summer’s expertise in ancient games. We are most grateful to Colchester and Ipswich Museums, Reading Museum, The British Museum and the University of Reading’s Special Collections for the loan of important artefacts from their collections. Han

Another highlight is the game pieces and other contents of the Stanway Doctor’s Grave, a first-century AD tomb discovered by archaeologists in Stanway, Essex, in 1996. (NB you may have heard that ‘Doctor’ referred also as  ‘The Druid of Colchester’, for indeed it is unclear whether he was Celtic, Roman, or other, Druid or even doctor. Nontheless he was buried with a unique gameboard that still baffles experts. You can learn more about it with this video made by the Panoply Vase Animation Project (created with support from the University of Reading’s Friends and Arts Committee) and of course by visiting the exhibition in the Ure Museum!

We have planned several exciting activities and outreach events to coincide with this exhibition. All are welcome but please note that bookings are required for the first two events:

 

Seminar Series – Heroic Beauty: Beautiful Heroism.

Author: Prof. Amy Smith.
Date: 15th January 2021.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image: Pottery black-figured neck-amphora depicting Achilles and Hector with gods 520BC-500BC (c) Trustees of the British Museum.

Heroic Beauty: Beautiful Heroism

The Department of Classics at Reading is delighted to present an online seminar series to accompany the forthcoming exhibition Troy: Beauty and Heroism, a British Museum spotlight loan at the Ure Museum. While the launch of the exhibition has been postponed, with this series of presentations we will begin to explore the themes of heroism and beauty and their interconnectedness throughout antiquity, particularly in relation to the epic tradition and its reception. Interested individuals are welcome to join us online for this series of presentations from Reading Classics’ own scholars, as well as some special guests, via Teams on Wednesdays from 27 January to 25 March at 4pm (link below).

27th January 2021 – Prof. Ian Rutherford (University of Reading) Beauty, Proportion and the Canon: What Did the Greeks Borrow From Egypt?

3rd February 2021 – Prof. Amy Smith (University of Reading) Beauty & Heroism in the Amazonomachy.

10th February 2021 – Dr. Claudina Romero Mayorga (University of Reading) Who’s the Fairest of Them All? The Judgement of Paris in Etruscan Mirrors.

17th February 2021 – Prof. Barbara Goff (University of Reading) Helens: Speeches and Silences.

24th February 2021 – Dr. Signe Barfoed (University of Oslo/Reading) The White Teeth of a Boar of Gleaming Tusks: Boar-hunt and Warrior Ethos in Homer’s world.

3rd March 2021 – Dr. Oliver Baldwin (University of Reading) Penelope: Inward and Outward Beauty.

10th March 2021 – Dr. James Lloyd-Jones (University of Reading) Alexander the Great and the Music of Paris and Achilles.

17th March 2021 – Dr. Sonya Nevin (Panoply/University of Roehampton) Beauty and Heroism in Panoply’s Our Mythical Childhood Animations.

25the March 2021 – Prof. Sophia Papaioannou (University of Athens) The Charming Artistry of Competitive Performance in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca 19.

For more information or to book for this online seminar series please contact Professor Amy C. Smith, Curator of the Ure Museum, at a.c.smith@reading.ac.uk.

Microsoft Teams meeting

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Forthcoming Talk by Dr Katherine Harloe – Winckelmann: Art and Death in Enlightenment Europe’

Winckelmann and the invention book coverOn Wednesday 5 February 2014, Dr Katherine Harloe will give a public talk with Ian Jenkins of the British Museum on the topic ‘Winckelmann: Art and Death in Enlightenment Europe’.  Below she discusses some aspects of Winckelmann’s life and work, his death, and what led her to make him the subject of her recent monograph.

Around ten in the morning on 8 June 1768, a commotion disturbed the staff and guests at Trieste’s Osteria Grande.  The hotel steward, Andreas Harthaber, was first to react. He was cleaning the main dining room when he heard a loud thump from room 10 above.  Running upstairs, he threw open the door to see the guest of that room stretched out on the floor, a noose around his neck.  The inhabitant of the neighbouring room knelt above him, one hand on his chest, the other brandishing a bloodied knife.  On seeing Andreas the assailant jumped up, pushed his way out of the door and fled from hotel and city. Doctors were called but it was too late to save the victim, who died from his injuries some hours later.

Such was the unexpected and brutal end of a man who was known to the Osteria staff simply as ‘Signor Giovanni’, but was soon revealed to be a person of some consequence.  Among his effects were gold and silver medals bearing likenesses of Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, and her son, the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II.  A passport, issued in Vienna some two weeks previously, identified its bearer as ‘Johannes Winckelmann, Prefect of Antiquities in Rome, on his way back to the Holy City’.

1024px-Johann_Joachim_Winckelmann_(Raphael_Mengs_after_1755) Wikimedia commonsThe notoriety of this murder is so great that the Grand Hotel Duchi d’Aosta, which now stands on the site once occupied by the Osteria Grande, still carries details of it on its homepage . The murderer, Francesco Arcangeli, had unwittingly killed one of the leading lights of Enlightened antiquarianism and connoisseurship.  Contemporary opinion of Winckelmann is best summed up in an early nineteenth-century French engraving, a copy of which is displayed in the case devoted to Winckelmann in the British Museum’s Enlightenment Gallery.  The main image, which is based on a portrait Winckelmann’s great friend, the neoclassical painter Anton Raphael Mengs, shows him dressed humbly, reading an edition of Homer.  Below, between copies of two of his most famous works (the Description of the Apollo Belvedere and the History of the Art of the Ancients), a legend declares ‘In the midst of Rome, Winckelmann lit the flame of the rational study of the works of the Ancients’.

My own fascination with Winckelmann began some eight years ago, when I was researching a project on changing conceptions of classical scholarship from the seventeenth century to today.  My experiences as an undergraduate classicist at Oxford, and then as a student of early modern history at Cambridge, had alerted me a strange disjunction between the notion of classics held by an early modern thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and those of my teachers and contemporaries.  In the early modern university, study of the Greek and Roman classics was an elementary discipline, taught to inculcate principles of good style and virtuous conduct through the study of uplifting examples.  This seemed a far cry from classics as I understood it, as a non-utilitarian, historical discipline aimed at recovering and reconstructing of the ancient world in all its aspect.

My attempts to account for this change led me back time and time again to Winckelmann’s name.  His researches in 1750s and 1760s Rome were key to transforming the academic study of classics, popularising the study of ancient objects and turning it from a mainly literary discipine into the holistic study and reconstruction of ancient cultures.  Winckelmann was the first to bring together interpretation of thousands of different artefacts from ancient Egypt, Etruria, Greece and Rome into an overarching story of the rise and decline of ancient cultures, and to connect differences in their characteristics and quality (‘style’) to the political and social conditions of their time.  Even if many of his judgements now seem to have been motivated by prejudice, the ambition of his historical ‘system’ – as well as some of its details, such as his broad distinctions between the archaic, classical and Hellenistic periods – have exerted a great influence on the concepts and categories of classical scholarship to this day.

Yet, in the eighteenth century as today, commentators were just as fascinated by other aspects of Winckelmann’s life and character: his biography, with its startling ascent from rags to riches, the overt homoeroticism of some of his most famous writings, and of course his bloody end.  Winckelmann inspired the generation of Goethe and Schiller; French revolutionaries hailed him as a champion of liberty; and in the early twentieth century he inspired novellas by German Nobel laureates Thomas Mann (‘Der Tod in Venedig’) and Gerhart Hauptmann (‘Winckelmann – das Verhängnis). My research to date has focused on Winckelmann’s impact on scholarship, but this Enlightenment life and personality is fascinating from any number of angles.

All are welcome to attend Dr Harloe’s talk in the British Museum’s Enlightenment Gallery on Wednesday 5 February at  1:15pm.