koyal group research information magazine on exploration and discoveries
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8/13/2019 Koyal Group Research Information Magazine on Exploration and Discoveries
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Koyal Group Research Information Magazine on
Exploration and Discoveries
Discoveries: Art, Science & Exploration from the University of
Cambridge Museums, Two Temple Place, London
Can you distil the intellectual life of centuries into an exhibition? If so,Cambridge’s eight major museums are uniquely placed to do so. Each is
distinctive, from the Museum of Zoology, home of a Tinamou egg acquired inUruguay by Charles Darwin (who cracked it by compressing it into too small
a box on the Beagle’s return voyage), and the Sedgwick Museum of EarthSciences, whose founder Reverend Sedgwick bought a rare Jurassic
ichthyosaur fossil for £50 in 1835, to high-minded Kettle’s Yard, where
collector Jim Ede amassed rigorous modernist abstract sculpture by Gaudier-Brzeska and Henry Moore in a modest domestic interior. But all breathe thespirit of inquiry and freedom of thought associated with the university.
Many of the objects, moreover, lead double lives: as trophy display piecesand as tools for daily teaching and research that altered understanding of
the world. The Zoology Museum’s Dodo skeleton found in Mauritius in 1870,
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for example, prompted awareness that man’s intervention in the ecosystem
was responsible for its extinction, while the Fitzwilliam’s unique album ofwoodblock colour prints by Utamaro, collected and interpreted by Edmond
de Goncourt in the 1890s, opens a window on the sophistications of 18th-century Edo.
It is a fascinating endeavour to pull such highlights together and transfer
them to William Waldorf Astor’s ornate Gothic mansion in London. The resultis a rich, diverse show with a strong historical arc: works recordingCambridge’s long scientific supremacy, such as Giovanni Pittoni’s “AnAllegorical Monument to Sir Isaac Newton” and a reproduction of James
Watson and Francis Crick’s 1953 skeletal model of DNA, are prominent. But
there are also many eclectic pieces that surprise and delight anew in thischanged placement: a copper lion, 3,000 years old, found in the Yemenidesert; the only known Sufi wooden and inlay Snakes and Ladders board,
brought home by a Victorian soldier in India decades before the game was
introduced to Britain.