More legacies of antiquity, reworkings of what remains. Displacements. Funerary portraits. Loss and the burden of interpretation. I have been posting some photographs of statues from the extraordinary collections in the Glyptotek in Copenhagen. The museum also holds a large collection of funerary reliefs from ancient Palmyra, the oasis city in Syria that once served as…
archetypes
Ovidiana — archaeological theatre
Becoming stone [Link] [Link]
Nolan’s Odyssey (3) — the collapse of civilization and the shape of history
Performing the archive — a study in theatre/archaeology In July I posted a response to Nolan’s Odyssey [Link] — an old story, I argued, but not the one that was being talked about. The movie faithfully restages not Homer but a nineteenth-century grand narrative of civilization and its fall. A month of reviews and a…
Roman
A Roman. 300 CE? No provenance, no context. Glyptotek, Copenhagen.
From Gitte and Poul’s garden
[Link]
Becoming stone
Figuration. Statue. Flint pebble rolled by the Storebaelt, Nyborg, Fyn. Titan Kronos, fearful of the prophecy that his children would overthrow him, ate them whole upon their birth. Until Rhea, his partner, gave Kronos a stone that he mistook for the infant god Zeus. Having returned from Mount Ida where he grew to maturity, Zeus…