No matter: today they can pull up the online catalogue with their iPhones. Visitors with any degree of specialist knowledge will not find much that they did not know already. In their place come printed labels for each exhibit, and a large illustrated board to introduce the theme of each gallery. Just as important as the layout of objects is what we are told about them. The walls and cabinets are less densely packed than before, allowing the artefacts to breathe. In the words of the curator, the aim there was to display “better rather than more”. On the other hand, the department of antiquities had a different strategy. In Western art, the emphasis was on getting paintings out of storage and finding room to display new acquisitions. Different departments have seized on the luxury of new space in different ways. There is twice as much exhibition space as before. The museum is now far too large to see in one visit. At the summit are a rooftop restaurant and a terrace surrounded by Oxford neo-gothic.Īlongside all of this, the small part of the museum that has not been made over - the sculpture hall in particular - now looks old-fashioned in comparison. Along the right-hand side, a staircase ascends from floor to floor, tracing enchanting curves as it does. Push through the columns of Cockerell’s neo-classical façade, and you come upon an atrium spanning five storeys of airy modernism. The benefit is a building that is equal in beauty to the art it houses. The cost was £61 million and closure for a year. This time, the site was expanded, not relocated. The collection has outgrown its building once before. The Ashmolean opened to the public once more on 7 November, transformed by Rick Mather Architects.
#Particulars art gallery full
The museum is full of such fascinating, appealing objects.
Mary turns up elsewhere dressed as a shepherdess or carved into a pilgrim’s keepsake scallop shell. Surprises such as this are what makes the Ashmolean Museum - for all that it also contains works by some of the greatest names in art history. Out of the mouth of God the Father he flies, heading for Mary over the head of a timid Gabriel. For once, the dove of the Holy Spirit comes complete with his own slipstream.
Half a million accessions later, and the charm of the museum is still in the quirkiness of this hoard of objects.Īs an example, take its late-medieval alabaster relief of the annunciation. The collection grew out of a “cabinet of curiosities” assembled in Lambeth earlier in the 17th century. THE University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum predates its own founding.
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