Lessons I Learned at the British Museum

One of the many delights of our suite here is that it’s only a hop, skip, and jump away from the British Museum. We’re getting wily about popping in on weekday mornings, when bus tours and school groups usually aren’t present. We take a stroll through one of the galleries, and slip away when giddy teens and South Koreans begin to gather around the Rosetta Stone. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

1. Religious iconography consists largely of someone having a very, very bad day. What with starving Buddhas, flayed saints, and mummified kittens, religious artifacts always seem to involve a horrorshow. We stayed away from the temporary exhibition focusing on Mayan ritual bloodletting, and from the macabre reproductions of Bronze Age funerals, but we failed to notice in time that the otherwise peaceful classical marbles included this depiction of Mithras slaying a bull. It’s a fascinating thing, in a grisly way. While Mithras is giving the poor beast what-for with a knife and a couple of fingers up the nose, a dog is tearing at its shoulder, and a snake is biting it, and (if you look closely) a large scorpion has got its testicles in both claws and is pinching for all it’s worth.

2. If you want to get the best work out of an artist, commission a portrait of something good to eat. This seems to be a truth that transcends all ages and cultures. Representations of objects and people may be crude or stylized, but show an artist a cow, and the results are always beautifully detailed and naturalistic. The Egyptian nobleman in a tomb painting may be shown in stiff profile, but the geese will be in action poses, and the hares will be complete down to the last whisker. Etruscan terracottas may lack facial features even when they depict the gods, but a sheep will have every curl in its fleece carefully fashioned, and a smile carved on its snout. I hypothesize from this that the status and income of artists has always been pretty much what it is now.

3. The history of Europe consists of people burying things to keep them away from other people. Honestly, if it weren't for hoards, we wouldn't know anything about the West prior to the invention of banking. Medieval people, with their usual directness, cut to the chase and stuck everything they had in a chest of some sort, so it could be buried at will: "Bob, we need a saint. Can you get us one?"

"I've got nine bits of Saint Eustace right here."

"Brilliant. Put them in a box, will you? You never know when you'll have Danes. And this time, make sure it looks like Eustace, will you? That one of Saint Agnes with her breasts off made everyone think she was holding a plate of bread."

True story. Take my advice, and avoid the religious antiquities.