The Ashmolean Museum
The Ashmolean Museum is full of art from the ancient world. The collection started in the XVII century, making it one of the oldest public museums in the UK. I love to wander its rooms filled with statues, ceramics, artifacts, fragments from a distant past. I can’t help but thinking to the person who carved, or painted, or molded the pieces of art; the one who commissioned it or bought it; the one who got it as a gift. I imagine the time the objects were in use, the statues on display, the paintings decorating important rooms. And then I think about the time they spent buried beneath rubble, covered by dirt or vegetation, forgotten, unappreciated, ignored. But then they were found, transported in a completely different world, in a different time, among different people. And they were appreciated again, recognized and admired. Not a bad ending…