The Roman Art Exhibit!

[elfs]

Despite Omaha's chest cold she was determined to go see the Roman Art Exhibit down an the Seattle Art Museum. To my shock and surprise, Yamaraashi-chan's mother agreed to hold onto her for another hour. (I'm not shocked that she wanted an extra hour; I'm shocked and pleasantly surprised that came to the phone at all, and I hope she'll agree that my asking nicely was preferable to her usual demanding posture.)

We drove down there and I dropped off the family and parked. I caught up with them just as Omaha was getting tickets. As it turned out, sadly, we were only going to be allowed in for about an hour and a half.

There were nine galleries in there. In the 80 minutes or so we had, Omaha had managed to get through two of them. I admire her dedication, but we were on a schedule to get home before Yamaraashi-chan got back and the kids had to go to bed anyway.

I hung out mostly in the "home living" section, as those are the details a writer often cares about. I was impressed by the amount of glasswork the Romans indulged; I had thought that everything was brass and silver, but there was a ton of fired ceramics and solid glasswork as well. It was very impressive. The indoor museum didn't do a very good job of capturing the scale of Roman living, from villas to farmhouses to dense four-story city apartments with no indoor plumbing, but that's hard to get done in that time. I thought an entire gallery dedicated to the hairstyles of Roman women a bit over the top, but apparently that's a very big deal to the Louvre, which owns the principal pieces.

The statues were all very beautiful, especially the ones of gods. The Zeus was nifty, and Phobos and Diemos were cool. Hadrian's satyrs were very cute. I wish I could have stayed longer. There were parts of the War gallery I really wanted to get more detail about. I took a few notes, the typical writer in me.

The crowd was such a mix-- college kids, lots of older folks, the whole gamut of Seattle society. There were several people making quick sketches of mosaics or statues.

I felt bad that we had to leave so early.

Comments

[elfs.livejournal.com]

It closed this weekend. I'm so sorry.

[(Anonymous)]

I recall hair was a big thing for Roman women anyway, apparently it was fairly common for statues of women to have removable hair so the statue was always in fashion *rolls eyes*.

Just something utterly silly about statues with interchangeable hair pieces.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

In L. Sprague de Camp's non-fiction "The Ancient Engineers", he tells that the glass industry was a non-trivial portion of the Roman economy. Glass was enough of a luxury that profit margins and taxes could be quite high, but cheap enough that the market was large. An urban legend of the time told of someone inventing an unbreakable glass beaker; he was put to death so he would not destroy the glass industry.

[(Anonymous)]

Ceramics and pottery was likely equally important, hell people have been making pottery in Britain at least hundreds of years before the Romans arrived back in the bronze and iron ages.

Not that the Romans didn't have better ways of doing this either.

That's something I sometimes feel people in the US miss out on, the connection to an ancient settled civilisation. Maybe it's just because I've lived my life with this connection I just can't imagine not having one.