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 pla ced to do so. Each is distinctive, from the Museum of Zoology, home of a Tinamou egg acquired in Uruguay by Charles Darwin (who cracked it by compressing it into too small a box on the Beagle’s return voyage), a nd the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, whose founder Reverend Sedgwick bought a rar e 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 the spirit of inquiry and freedom of thought associated with the university. Many of the objects, moreover, lead double lives: as trophy display pieces and as tools for daily teaching and research that altered understanding of the world. The Zoology Museum’s Dodo skeleton found in Ma uritius in 1870,

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Page 1: Koyal Group Research Information Magazine on Exploration and Discoveries

8/13/2019 Koyal Group Research Information Magazine on Exploration and Discoveries

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/koyal-group-research-information-magazine-on-exploration-and-discoveries 1/2

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,

Page 2: Koyal Group Research Information Magazine on Exploration and Discoveries

8/13/2019 Koyal Group Research Information Magazine on Exploration and Discoveries

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/koyal-group-research-information-magazine-on-exploration-and-discoveries 2/2

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.