British Museum

[ewx]

I went to the Babylon Exhibition at the British Museum. This is on until March. It doesn't have the wow factor of the Byzantine or the First Emperor exhibitions but I still found it worth the entrance fee.

The most immediately striking ancient pieces are the lion and dragon brick reliefs; these might be familiar from other museums and seeing the model of the Ishtar gate it's clear why, there must have been dozens of them. Much of the rest is writing in clay, which unless you read cuneiform tend to look much like one another; so the value largely comes in the extensive explanation and interpretation. The Cyrus Cylinder does stand out both in appearance and significance however; the Persians are an important link in the chain from the seriously ancient to the classical.

The other half consists of more recent (i.e. merely the last thousand years or so) interpretations of Babylon. If you like paintings of the Tower Of Babel, you should go l-) There's other good stuff though, e.g. Blake's Nebuchadnezzar.

I saw bits of Statuephilia too. Gormley's flasher angel occupies the entrance (where the big round donation receptacle was) and dominates the otherwise empty space. Quinn's Kate Moss sits, rather uncomfortably by the look of it, somewhat behind Lely's Venus which I think still has the edge over the modern sculpture.