Bronze

[ewx]

We went to the Bronze exhibition at the Royal Academy Of Arts. This features dozens of works from all over the world, reaching back millenia into the past, and grouped loosely by what is depicted.

Pride of place, on entry, is given to a dancing satyr (which is rather more impressive than Wikipedia’s picture might suggest). The piece that most caught my eye however was the Trundholm sun chariot, made around 3,500 years ago and found in modern Denmark.

Most of the items were representative of some person or animal though in some cases the primary purpose was functional: weights shaped like (and apparently cast from) beetles, a strigil with an attached figure who is using a strigil.

There is a thin scattering of modern works, the more abstract of them seeming rather out of place, and suffering from the tendency of artists to provide wordy justifications for art or craft works made for their own sake.

We’d previously had afternoon tea at Brown’s for lunch, which was nice enough but really quite expensive l-)

Comments

[rochvelleth.livejournal.com]

Wow, that chariot is rather stunning. Its iconography reminds me *partly* of the sort of thing you get in Egypt and similar areas around that time - evidence of contact, maybe? Wikipedia puts all the emphasis on possible Danubian origins and 'Indo-European mythology', but I don't see any reason why influence from outside Europe and/or the IE-speaking area should be ruled out.

But then there's probably a whole load of scholarship on the object that I'm entirely ignorant of!

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I don’t know the scholarship either. The Nationalmuseet’s website justifies Norse origin using the spiral design (without much further detail, but the Egtved Girl had a belt plate with a spiral design so maybe that’s one of the things they’re comparing with).
Some form of contact does seem plausible, especially if one accepts a Danube origin; by water it’d have been Egyptians and Hittites (i.e. powerful states that could have kept piracy down) most of the way along the Mediterranean coast with just a hop across the Black Sea to the mouth of the Danube. Fairly direct contact might have been in-principle possible.
Still, explaining the transit of the sun in terms of a locally familiar vehicle doesn’t seem like a very surprising idea - perhaps it was independently invented.