wanderlust
TEFAF Maastricht, 7 - 15 March 2020
Visitors were taken on a virtual journey from Britain to Mesopotamia with the only extant Roman road map, the Tabula Peutingeriana, as their guide. Along the way, objects were placed within niches, each representing a region or town. Time travel through into the heart of the Roman empire through some of the most compelling objects of that era.
wanderlust
TEFAF Maastricht, 7 - 15 March 2020
Visitors were taken on a virtual journey from Britain to Mesopotamia with the only extant Roman road map, the Tabula Peutingeriana, as their guide. Along the way, objects were placed within niches, each representing a region or town. Time travel through into the heart of the Roman empire through some of the most compelling objects of that era.
Medusa Fresco
‘...On the Chalcidian shore, where Vesuvius rears his broken wrath... Wonderful but true! Shall future progeny of men believe... that cities and peoples are buried below and the ancestral countryside vanished in a common doom’
Statius (died c.96 CE), Silvae, Book IV
Roman polychrome wall painting, circa 1st century AD, possibly from Pompeii.
Old Kingdom relief
‘There are also subterranean fissures and winding passages ... and on the walls of these caverns they carved many kinds of birds and beasts’
Ammianus Marcellinus (d.381-400 CE), Res Gestae, book XXII
Limestone relief, Old Kingdom, Early 6th Dynasty, circa 2323 - 2291 BC.
cullet
‘That part of Syria which is known as Phoenicia and borders on Judea near the colony of Ptolemais ... The beach stretches for no more than half a mile, and yet for many centuries the production of glass depended on this area alone’
Pliny the Elder (d.79 CE), Natural History, book XXXVI
Roman glass cullet ‘boulder’, 2nd century BC - 2nd century AD.
Proto-cuneiform
‘I think that the letters of the alphabet have always been known to the Assyrians’
Pliny the Elder (d.79 CE), Natural History, book VII
Proto-Cuneiform clay tablet with an account of monthly rations, Late Uruk Period, circa 3100 - 3000 BC.
Gandharan stucco
‘Among the Indians are those philosophers also who follow the precepts of Boutta, whom they honour as a god on account of his extraordinary sanctity.’
Clement of Alexandria (d.c.215 CE), Stromata, I.15
Over life-size stucco head of Buddha, circa 4th century AD.
