Divine cat (Ours never had a nose ring)

Divine cat (Ours never had a nose ring)

We’re back from an excellent little 24 hour whirlwind visit to the Mighty Metropolis aka London. Most of it was spent in the British Museum, where we had tickets to see the Chinese terra cotta army. No photos from that, but it was quite remarkable and absolutely worth it.

I took lots of photos (many quite mediocre, or worse) in other parts of the British Museum, including this in a small temporary exhibit right by the entrace called "Divine Cat". This bronze egyptian scuplture was donated to the Museum by a Major Gayer-Anderson, who "was a keen restorer of ancient metal objects". Recent analysis (including X-rays) revealed that the good Major jammed a metal cylinder in the head to give it more strength, repaired a major crack, and applied a thick layer of green paint to help hide the repairs.

Oh.

An excellent little exhibit, and a nice example of the many complexities of managing a collection such as theirs.

And the cat was cool too.

I’ve posted the whole unedited lot up on my Flickr events account, and will post tidied up versions of some of the more interesting ones to my “main” Flickr account.

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Cool juxtapositions

A gentleman and a scholar

On my Twitter stream this morning was this from kjell_:

“The disappearance of age-old pleasures and privileges is the first unmistakable sign of progress.” -Bernard Rudofsky

followed by this from Vaguery:

scanning an 1850 Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, just ’cause. And for the Agassiz

Of course it’s convenient that Vaguery’s Twitter things have a very high proportion of “scanning some cool old document to save it for the world”. Still, I thought it was cool :-).

And I don’t know what the rest of you are doing this evening, but we’re going to the British Museum to see the Chinese terra cotta army (or the bit of it that’s on display there at the moment)! You never know, I might take a photo (or 200).

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