An Education
Plastered skull from Jericho, around 7000 BC, shows evidence of artificial deformation (from infancy) and traces of plastered decoration
Autumn 2015
um’s arrangement and catalogue, casting doubt on the descriptions and authenticity of a number of objects and the accounts given by “the ridiculous fellow [the so-called Sub-Custos] who was showing us the speci- mens”. The Museum’s situation was not helped by the perennial absence of the Museum’s Keeper, Mr Parry, who “is always lounging about in the inns, so that one scarcely ever meets him in the museum.” Amidst all these complaints the one item that seems to have ex- cited him most was a “curiosity”, typical of a seven- teenth-century wunderkammer: ‘‘An extraordinarily curious horn which had grown on the back of a wom- an’s head. It was exactly like a horn, except that it was thinner and browner in colour”. But, above all, what shocked Uffenbach’s German
with plastered cheeks and cowrie-shell eyes which might be read as one of the earliest attempts at por- traiture and Lucien Freud’s Small Naked Portrait, one of the artist’s most tender and painterly experiments in the genre. Similar journeys can be taken across our collections following countless different threads and thoughts: from the earliest manmade decorated ves- sels to contemporary studio pottery or from images of Egypt’s first rulers to propaganda prints from China’s Cultural Revolution. Our exhibitions build on and ex- tend these possibilities and on October 14th we open an exhibition drawn from the Ashmolean’s own col- lection of drawings and those of the Uffizi and Christ Church that not only challenges notions about the role of drawing in Venice through peerless works by art- ists from Titian to Canaletto but in a postscript sug- gests the continuing potency of this tradition through a group of works by the contemporary British artist Jenny Saville. The most colourful account from a visitor to the original Ashmolean paints a very different picture of a very different institution. In 1710 the German aris- tocrat Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach visited the Museum, about which he had heard much, and wrote a wonderfully disdainful description of what he found. Climbing the stairs lined with bad paintings, “noth- ing very special”, he entered the Museum on the first floor, where the objects that first caught his eye were some very large goat horns – “for this realm is every- where very prolific in horn, and moreover all horned creatures are extraordinarily well-furnished with them”. There were certainly pieces within the crowd- ed displays that fired his interest including “a beautiful stuffed reindeer”, “the Crucifixion of Christ very deli- cately carved on a peach stone” and a fine collection of minerals but for the most part he felt that there were better specimens to be found in the private collections of Europe. He was particularly scornful of the Muse-
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and aristocratic sensibilities was the chaos of a public Museum open to all, which, in exciting public interest, threatened the very survival of the collection: “But it is surprising that things can be preserved even as well as they are, since the people impetuously handle ev- erything in the usual English fashion and… even the women are allowed up here for sixpence; they run here and there, grabbing at everything and taking no rebuff from the Sub-Custos.” Uffenbach was not alone in his disdainful assessment of the quality and value of the early Ashmolean, even at its establishment there were those dismissively describing it as the ‘Knick-Knacka- tory’, but such opinions ignored, perhaps wilfully, the clear purpose and considerable ambition of Elias Ash- mole’s original foundation.
The core of the original Ashmolean was the col- lection of ‘rarities’ assembled by the Royal Garden-
‘Two-Dog Palette’ (about 3300–3100 BC), siltstone palettes such as these were used for grinding cosmetic pigments were often included in Predynastic burials
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