Classically inspired Art

Our splendid galleries of Egyptian, Greek and Roman material have had such a profound impact through history that these great civilisations have inspired countless generations of artists to record and reinterpret their ideas of the ancient world.

In the Egyptian gallery this is graphically demonstrated by the more recent paintings of Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Henry Newman and Hubert Robert.

This complementary and thematic trend continues in the sense that ancient Greece has been recreated through the artistic skill of George Braques, Keith Haring, Andre Masson and Pablo Picasso.

The juxtaposition of ancient, neoclassical, modern and contemporary art is dramatically and elegantly expressed in a series of ingenious arrangements that combine ancient statues of Venus with Yves Klein’s Blue Venus, The Birth of Venus by Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalí’s sculpture of Venus as a giraffe; a Roman marble head of emperor Caracalla and a drawing of the ancient bust by Henri Matisse; mythological scenes and characters portrayed in artworks by Renoir, Rubens or Hirst to mention but a few, and many more novel arrangements in museology.