Formative fakes at the Natural History Museum

Long before getting interested in cultural history, I was somewhat more engaged with natural history. This interest, which found primary expression in a few childhood visits to Colchester Zoo, London Zoo and the Natural History Museum, was to be superseded by other, perhaps less wholesome pursuits: from addictive computer games to adult horror novels, via late night confessional talk shows (on pirate radio). Then came the final and most corrupting rite of passage – a close acquaintance with the mid 1980s independent record charts. By the time I took possession of my first Smiths album, I had lost all interest in comparable avian wingspans, fish longevity, or running speeds for land mammals. Kensington Market, home to various examples of indie regalia, was thus soon to usurp Kensington’s finest museums.

But once, as I well recall, a stunning, full size, wood and plaster model of a blue whale, housed at NHM, was chief among points of interest. That remained a fact. There was a totally bonkers ‘whale in the room’. Their Victorian gallery was hardly big enough to house this 28m leviathan. It could not be apprehended in a single view. You could only edge around the massive flanks or pass dangerously under its belly.

For me it was the whale, then. For others, the NHM offered Dippy as a star attraction. I continue to reminisce, now about Dippy. They were another seeming folly, and also a crazy idea. This was a replica skeleton, as false as it was intrinsically structural, which assembled, in plaster form, the 292 bones once owned by a Jurassic-era sauropod. Yes, Dippy was a diplodocus specimen, unearthed in 1899, in Wyoming, USA, and I did think the model bones were swell, too; it mattered little that neither that whale nor Dippy the dinosaur were (what we think of as) the real thing; when young and your imagination is strong, differences between the actual versus the artificial are just a notional technicality.

Dippy has proliferated as replicas tend to do. The original still ‘lives’ in Pittsburgh; but between 1905 and 1932, amazingly, casts were dispatched to Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Bologna, St Petersburg, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Mexico City, and Munich, plus of course the NHM in London. It has been called diplodiplomacy though it is not clear how the sauropod has been nicknamed beyond the English speaking world. On these shores, Dippy has enjoyed plenty of recent action. A tour of UK museums has seen him/her stay for periods in Dorset, in Birmingham, in Belfast, in Glasgow, Newcastle, Cardiff, Rochdale, Norwich and now in Coventry. For a single example of a creature who last drew breath some 150 million years ago, that is quite a staggering afterlife.

Dippy’s bone count, which remains extensive, appears almost to be the fixture’s raison d’être. It would have have been easier, one expects, to make a fibreglass dinosaur with full musculature and skin. And indeed on home turf, outside the Carnegie Museum of Natural History there in Pennsylvania, onesuch model greets passersby on street level. In much the same way, it would have been possible for the NMH to settle for their 221 bone authentic skeleton of a blue whale. Nicknamed Hope by early curators, the bone whale, rather than the wooden whale, was beached off the Western coast of Ireland. This beast was another which could not have dreamed of their posthumous career.

They had the bones; but the model was needed. As a child I would dream only of that giant model. To be in its space was to be underwater with it. It is not what you would call a highly realistic model, as the museum acknowledges. But it did let me commune with the terrors of the deep, terrors I preferred to any realistic fears a child might get; it checked out against various picture books and it allowed me to enjoy the one quality which this model shares with Hope and Dippy: mere size, which is an urgent concern at such a tiny age.

From the earliest dioramas to the latest documentaries, presentations of the natural world can surpass its reality. Nature is an endless fund of things to reconstruct and then to gawp at. For the record, the hierarchy of attractions to be found in the NHM circa 1980 was, for me: 1) model whale; 2) model diplodocus; and then, 3) actual whale.

Music from a Cold War Bunker in Albania

Iso-polyphony may sound like a tech feature from a high-end speaker, but in actual fact it couldn’t be more rooted in the past. Specifically, it is rooted in ancient myth and Albanian tradition. It is an entire musical form. In recent years a sound art piece has opened at Te Kubé in Gjirocaster, wihch restores the link between this music and the siren song of Odysseus fame and the muses. These are figures said, of course, to guard Hades rather than your nearest Bang & Olufsen showroom.

It may not have spread far from the Balkans or the ancient world but Iso-Polyphony is a powerful art as well as an enduring one. At Te Kubé, it can be experienced in a 48m-long Cold War bunker, burrowing under a mountainside from the belly of a former mosque. The home of this project is now an archive, a cafe, and a shop. For some years became a trapeze school to evade closure by dictator, Enver Hoxha; there are some layers to this cultural history.

I’ll try to cut to the present. There we were, Little A and I, alone in this subterranean passage, lit green and blue by nightclubesque LEDs. We were surrounded on all sides by walls of rock, uneven both underfoot and overhead. It made me, for one, feel gently intrepid, curious about what to expect from this shaft that was receding deep into the rock. The stone glowed and appeared to ring with the music. We paced the distance in this confined space; and concealed speakers expanded the trajectory with an invisible chorus of voices singing in two unfamiliar languages: Albanian and melodic counterpoint.

This then was Iso-Polyphony a form of improvised song which assumes dissonant harmonies and evokes grief, longing, and a certain Balkan exoticism. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly don’t expect all music to be as catchy as post-1950s Western pop. I do indeed like a bit of detuned guitar, a bit of experimentation with the drone. Distortion pedals and feedback amps, yes yes. Freeform sax with added skronk, sure. But here was a genre where the instruments were unalloyed voices (plus a piano but not as we know it). Without going electric, this Byzantine polyphony offered a release as cathartic as a crunching rock breakdown with the volume turned up to 11.

A voice can express all sorts of moods and take on all sorts of tones. The mood of the voices here seemed to me to be pained. The tone was sharp and it cut to the quick. I do not speak Albanian, but this just expands the imaginable range of Iso-Polyphony for an ignorant English speaker like me.

Do they sing for grief or for broken hearts? Is it a song of defiance from Communist times or was this a twenty-first century Östalgia trip? All that can be said for sure is this: the music was not in any way already in my known cultural landscape and yet it evoked a rich beauty which I had not expected to find in the rural south of this Balkan state.

Here at the musical form’s institutional stronghold, the Home of Polyphony, the tradition is exploded. Te Kubé houses a contemporary recorded piece for an audio-visual sound installation recorded by a youth group; it is not the preserve of aged and weathered peasants in traditional dress. Composer and multi-instrumentalist Robert Bisha has also used a prepared piano, which, after Fluxus, remains a radical gesture. He titles the work Iso-Polyphony Deconstruction. For anyone with a passing knowledge of literary theory or architecture, it’s all definitely outward looking.

I think that the deconstruction takes place along the length of the tunnel as the piano, the soloists and the bass note drone singer are pulled apart by the staggered speakers. Deconstruction could also refer to the confusing turn of events in which a Cold War bunker has become a refuge for some intangible world heritage: a gesture which sees Albania opening up to Europe and impressing UNESCO with the importance of this form. To be fair, UNESCO’s official recognition could be an umbrella for the whole of the city we find ourselves in. Gjirocaster, which seems a beautiful place, is a town so closely associated with Iso-Polyphony it is nicknamed the City of Lamentation.

On the day of our visit, the City of Lamentation was permeated with grey skies and a mid-summer drizzle and a mist which wreathed the surrounding hills and dampened the dark slate rooftops of the traditional and picturesque houses. In the event of a nuclear strike, this comely scene would have been erased. The bunker, built in secret during the 1970s, remains, however, and we booked a 5pm tour of an attraction that, prior to breaking our car journey from Berat to Ksamil, we had not even known about. That’s Trip Advisor for you.

It was well worth it. Much more extensive than the sound tunnel, this bunker featured such echt period pieces as an original Škoda-built generator, portraits of Lenin in Soviet textbooks, nuclear winter bathroom facilities, and the mayor’s sole landline telephone. This site was once intended for 200 Communist Party members. Had the worst come to the worst then, existence would have become for them one endless round of queuing for tinned food and the toilet. Unthinkable really.

Shacked up in here with Enver Hoxha – no matter how enlightened, intellectual and cultured this dictator is said to have been – existence would have become a kind of living death. An Albanian CP member would be granted a free pass, therefore, to the Underworld; in the surrounding mountains there would have been few left to sing for their soul.

I was brought back once more to the nearby sound tunnel, which makes explicit a link between Iso-Polyphony and Greek myth. The other-worldly musical form, which is some 2,500 years old, comes to us replete with a close association to ship-wrecking and sailor-dooming sirens. It is fitting that a nuclear-age Hades should ring out with these voices. I am just thankful for the safe onward passage of our hire car.

Trip: August 2024. Check out the album At Least Wave Your Handkerchief At Me by Saz’iso for a flavour of this compelling genre.

We visit the original Parthenon, in Athens

There is scaffolding across the near elevation of the Parthenon and it looks like the most famous monument in Greece has been subsumed by a glitchy photoshop layer. Think of an unhinged graphic designer working on the sleeve of a minimal techno album. In other words, although far too hot for the builders right now, the Acropolis has been enhanced by the patina of restoration work on its centrepiece. Civilisation evolved here; a data driven grid reflects where we’ve got to.

Both old and new are grand in this place. The vast temple – which appears so frequently in tourist literature on Greece; which graces thousands of illustrations of myth; that you’ll find in scores of architecture source books, plus countless cartoons about philosophy, not to mention a deluge of souvenir fridge magnets – is somehow a fresh sight to me. And, from the audio guide, I learn how: the stone base is convex and the pillars lean into one another and these subliminal engineering tweaks, no matter how subtle, are what give the Parthenon its spring and glaring white energy.

I overhear an American tourist boast about a copy in Nashville. And although tiny models of the Parthenon occupy snow domes the world over, the world’s less well-known replica is full scale and lives in a park in the Deep South. Some might say it’s better than the original since it houses a recreation of a 42ft statue of the presiding deity, Athena, and casts of the marbles which once adorned the pediment here. Greece has thus far failed to retrieve the marbles from the British Museum and the first statue of Athena is lost. So my provocative vote goes to Nashville and the year of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, 1897, for best example of this building from the fifth century BC.

Those marbles really are a sticking point, mind you, and I’m glad that the guidance notes which we came across in Athens do not mince words. The marbles are ‘loot’, Lord Elgin had a piratical ‘crew’, and the transport of 75m of exquisite ancient sculpture to London in 1801 is unambiguous theft, not to mention collusion with the Ottoman government of the day. So if you’ve fallen for the line that the so-called Elgin Marbles are safer in Holborn, please visit the Acropolis Museum. It is truly world class. Since the plunder Greek archaeologists have found more than enough remaining items on the famous hilltop to fill an extensive, imaginative, beautifully curated twenty-first century museum.

When you enter this venue, you can look down from the forecourt to see a complex of ruins; the ground floor seems cantilevered over a hamlet’s worth of ancient residences You can explore this scene from a crisscross of gantries, shaded by the ground floor of the Museum overhead. Greeks are obviously fantastic custodians. The dig site boasts a museum within a museum, a sequence of glass chambers in which you can browse ancient chattels and ornaments; a panel in the floor, sealed with toughened glass, allows you to gaze down upon existing mosaics and even, here and there, walk across them.

Somehow the upper floors manage to emphasise the artistic quality of the recovered exhibits; many have been stolen; many have not. The new building could be a contemporary art space. The British Museum, by contrast, still has neo-classical bank vibes and reflects our national fetish for classicism in its presentation of Greek relics. Here in the Acropolis Museum, one better appreciates the aesthetic values of the time as seen on the statues and friezes, with less emphasis on idealised physiques and classical history, more on creative expression, vitality and colour (One hears that the classical world was once awash with colour paint; here you can still see the bright flecks.)

Our hosts didn’t get everything right at the Acropolis. They were, for example, reluctant to give Prof D credit for a mobility impairment and let her use the disability elevator from the foot of the Attica hill top to a vantage point from where she could get a proper look at the monument we had paid to come and see. Without this facility she would have been unable to climb any of the baking steps never mind reach the summit.

It was also curious to see a young couple strike a ballroom dance pose together for a photo of the far end of the Parthenon. One of the guards told them off quite ‘strictly’. Those guards may think they are guarding civilisation, dignity, and civic pride. But this is also the land of Dionysus, Eros, Pan, many, many satyrs, and the philosopher Diogenes who was to openly masturbate in the Agora just to make a point. Much worse behaviour than recreating Strictly Come Athens. Anyhow the scene gave me a chuckle, not least because the male dance partner was already looking a bit embarrassed long before the guard blew her whistle and a hundred tourists turned to look their way.

So there we were. Scaffolding at one end to provide structural maintenance and valuable protection. Gesture policing at the other end to provide compliance with brand guidelines. And a world class repository for the many priceless artefacts which were created to stock this iconic archaeological site. No photos in the museum either. The entirety really was well looked after.

By way of an epilogue, we visited Athens at the peak of the 2024 Greek wildfires. Aided by strong winds, the fires were eating up the surrounding forests at speeds of up to 15kmh. The evening we stepped off the plane, the air smelled like a barbecue. We then sat in the Airbnb watching BBC World and contemplating the potential prospect of evacuation given that suburbs were already burning. The next day, unpeturbed, we passed our time in a tourist bubble. The acropolis, which is after all a stone mountain and the highest point in Athens was probably also the safest location. But from up there, by the evening on day two, there was no sign of fire. And day by day the risk dissipated.

Thank the gods (and the EU Civil Protection Mechanism which triggered the arrival of firefighters and equipment from eight European countries) for saving the Greek capital on this occasion.

Taking the plunge in immersive shows at both The Barbican and Tate Modern

On the 23rd July I visited two shows in London which promised an immersive gallery experience. In their evocation of early years and final moments, neither disappointed.

UNLIMITED SCREENTIME

In William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, an island of marooned British schoolboys soon descends into chaos. In Ricochets, Francis Alÿs’s 2024 show at the Barbican, children at play in an array of global locations may be seen to embody the best of human nature not the worst.

Ricochets takes as its theme children’s games, rather than immature attempts at self-governance. At play, whether in Switzerland or in Afghanistan, children express joy, imagination, fair play and innocence. One should add to the list ‘vulnerability’ at times of conflict, but I will return to that.

Some of the games were new to me. Most were merely in new locations. It’s been a while, but of course I too have eagerly played tag, hop scotch, and conkers. I have improvised a go-kart, had a snowball fight and raced along with a stick and a hoop. Hard to believe I know.

But I have not danced barefoot on a dusty roadside. I have not played laser tag with a shard of broken mirror. I have not taken part in an elaborate game of mime football, at risk of getting shot. My chances of reaching adulthood physically unharmed were always very good compared with the subjects of some of the films collected here.

So I was surprised and yet not surprised to find that laughter and exuberant high pitched shouts can ring out from some of the worst trouble spots on Earth. The faces of our western kids do not have a monopoly on smiles. In the sometime absence of healthcare, education, and even food, children worldwide still have access to free time and creativity.

Alÿs has bedecked the Barbican’s gallery with some two or three dozen screens. It is ironic that many of the younger visitors to this show, of which there were many at the time of my visit, will get all the screen time they want for an hour or two, while their parents sanction the exposure as artistic nourishment.

It may be that the smartphone has supplanted the possession of any compendium of children’s games. I had a book once, with 101 activities to try with my younger brother, and I thought of games like ‘rock, paper, scissors’ or marbles as throwbacks to the time of Victorian Britain. But I couldn’t be more wrong.

Marbles dates back to prehistoric times for example. Rock, paper, scissors is embraced by our contemporaries in many corners of the world. Interpretation on site makes the point that while civilisations rise and fall, the games children play endure, perhaps thanks to their very marginality.

The Barbican has pressed the immersive button here to market a show which on paper sounds – I’ll be honest – quite boring.

Actually it’s hugely rich. Not just because, as one circumnavigates the third-floor space, the films accumulate to imbue the low-lit space into a pulsating essence of play, a hub for all these games worldwide.

Alÿs augments this 360-degree, darkened cinematic spectacle with small jewel-like paintings on backlit canvas which immortalise various dusty roads the artist has come across in his many investigative travels,. Tiny figures and cherished ludic props are an utter charm.

These travels, to places as remote as Mosul or Juarez, might seem fraught with risk were it not for the blithe and cheerful ubiquitous presence of the most vulnerable in society. In Ukraine, the kids dress in battle fatigues and flag down passing cars in search of Russians. It must be awful to experience territorial invasion; it must be irresistible to feel as if the whole thing is a quite serious game.

It was interesting that not one of the films had been made in Gaza. Alÿs has previously made work about the Israeli occupation of Palestine and one imagines that the planning for this show was too well advanced by this time last year to have responded to events subsequent to October7th 2023.

Or perhaps there was time. Time, but no appetite? How could the artist have presented the lighter side of a conflict filled with so many images and reports of countless children who have had limbs amputated without anaesthetic, been wounded and orphaned, had severe burns across the whole body or been targeted by IDF snipers; shot expertly in the head.

The harmlessness of children’s games is a major takeout of this exhibition, as are the risks which players take. The boys playing soccer without a ball on a street in Mosul are, unbelievably, risking death at the hands of the Islamic State. They are scattered by a gunshot at the end of their game.

While the films in ‘Ricochets’ are for the most part joyful, two more elements underpin them with mystical seriousness. I have already mentioned the elegiac paintings, there are also modestly sized animations which build on their mystery and emerge from the darkness of the mezzanine level.

By this point I was well ahead in a game that most art loving grown ups will recognise. That of pacing oneself around a gallery, studying whatever documentation one finds, and doing what it takes to release the dopamine which an art fix can provide.

THE DYING OF THE LIGHT

Being akin to a near death experience, Solid Light had me craving a lit cigarette; and as a reconstruction of an artwork first shown in the 1970s New York loft scene, it had me craving to be a full chain smoker, surrounded by nicotine addicts. There we all would be, staring up and down these funnels of light and contemplating the meaning of the all-powerful pinpoints of light.

I don’t know how else to interpret these works at Tate Modern, other than metaphors for the soul’s passage. And I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t agree that, as a spiritual journey, death would be more likely to come to me or you wreathed in tobacco smoke, rather than the artificial mist used to recreate the atmosphere of a downtown art studio. It was a sanitised mist which we are assured by the gallery notes is nontoxic.

But I still can’t deny the power of these installations. Expanding light envelopes the viewer in a sharply defined cone. The don’t-worry-it’s-safe air pollution swirls like a sci-fi film special effect. Cloudy little puffs stream around the illuminated space and billow around in waves that seem all but sentient. This close to an imagined death there is an unveiling of previously invisible energies.

This is a bijou exhibition which Tate may hope reaches the heights of popularity achieved by their best-known recent excursion into immersive art. I am talking about Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms which, for the longest time, was the delight of families, selfie takers and people who like to be transported by art. Antony McCall Smith’s own ‘response’ is not only a mirror for what we think of when we think of death. Unlike the Kusama, it is also an adventure in finitude.

In the darkness of this modest space on the fourth floor of the Blavtatnik Building, there are really only two ways out. One is through the pinprick of light, the eye of a needle, and out into a blinding vision of the Pearly Gates, to mix metaphors and impose a culturally Christian reading. The other is by following a lit green Exit sign: another concession to our latter day culture of health and safety.

But for all that, I salute the young couple who, canoodling on the gallery floor, were sharing their vision of the end of the line. They seemed caught in this imperious beam, enveloped by a happy memory which flew in the face of material realities. The prime mover in this show is a projector which, once the smoke clears, will be found to offer nothing more than a bright white full stop.

‘Ricochets’ is at Barbican until 1 September 2024. ‘Solid Light’ is at Tate Modern until 27 April 2025.

An encounter with the Emperor Constantine in Rome

Last month, Prof D and I visited Rome. Despite the obstacles presented by baking sun and frequent stops for street food, I was on a mission to see a piece of living history at the Museum of the Capitoline.

A bus coughed us up before the Altare della Patria. It was completed in 1935. You might imagine it to be one more local element of the ancient world. But the steps, as wide as the bleachers of a stadium, and the portico, which fronts a temple to the fatherland rather than to a mythic god, is a monument to a nineteenth century king, Victor Emmanuel II, who unified Italy in 1861. An image of both empire and kingdom served Italy badly, and Mussolini well. The fascist dictator held his rallies here in the 20s and 30s.

Glossing over that far right set dressing for a moment, we found an adjacent set of steps to the Musei Capitoline. We were braced to pay €30 each to get in, but after a quick exchange with a staff member I discovered that the main object of my interest could be viewed, free of charge, in a garden behind the museum.

This well paved green space, an adjunct to the Villa Cafferelli, occupies the site of a former place of worship: the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. But I was not here to bask in the presence of Jupiter even if our sightseeing focus was no more ‘real’ than this piece of divine representation.

As we approached an archway in the tall garden wall, we could see the household deity. But it was no supernatural entity, rather a third century emperor of Rome. He was not disguised as a bull or a swan, but took the form of a 42-foot replica statue.

This was an ‘off the scale’ representation of the Emperor Constantine, whose notable achievements included the official recognition of Christianity and the relocation of his vast empire’s HQ to the city which for so many years bore his name, Constantinople. Given the forthcoming reach and influence of the Roman Catholic Church, Jupiter must still be spinning on his cloud at this turn of events.

This imposing statue has had various iterations. In its first form, in around about the fifth century BC, when it first emerges from the annals, it was the God of the heavens, rather than the ruler of ancient Rome, who wore the crown here.

In 69BC the statue got its first remake. Still dedicated to the lofty boss of the ancient world, it now took the seated form we see today: bare torso and, waist down, a cloak.

In 80 AD, after a fire, the drapery was to inspire a hybridized successor fashioned in marble and, perhaps, bronze. As an art historian I need to describe this mixed media sculptures as an acrolith. And given that present idol is comprised of polystyrene resin, plaster powder, bronze powder, and stucco, the Colossus of Constantine remains very much a composite.

Between 80 AD and 2024, there is an interim detail of note. Between 217 and 222 AD our rendering of the God of Thunder was struck by lightning. At which point the Romans felt okay to abandon their presiding deities and ascribe all of that power and pomp to their current leader Constantine, though perhaps that changing of the guard was a bit more ‘top down’.

By the twenty-first century, not much was left of this repurposed monument. A head, a foot, fragmentary museum holdings rather than expressions of imperial power. But time, museum time, is surely nonlinear and on the day we visited in 2024, the glory of Rome had cycled round and restored one of its most visible outward forms, in the representation of one of its most illustrious emperors.

Tall as he is, Constantine is all the more imperial for the fact that he is seated. We enter his presence as petitioners on foot, stepping into a cool walled garden which can barely contain him. Despite lightweight materials, and the educated technical guesswork which has led to his full three-dimensional reconstruction, this man has presence.

Who would have thought that a fairly academic exercise, involving the study of two-dimensional photographs, literary and epigraphic sources, and the comparisons with other seated statues from the era, could yield such awesome, immediate results?

His fierce gaze is upturned to the left, as if in recollection of something once seen by that pair of monstrous carved eyeballs. His unsmiling mouth is set with calm authority; a squared off masculinity extends from his jaw to the definition of his torso. (It is literally and metaphorically chiselled.) The haircut, it has to be said, is a bit Mark Zuckerberg, who was reportedly inspired, style-wise at least, by the fringes of the Caesars of yore.

His props are are those of a profane ruler aspiring to the sacred. His right arm is lightly crooked around the head of a sceptre. His left arm comes towards us with an orb in his upturned palm. Both these accoutrements offer a regal mien, which appears to modern eyes in contrast to the loose and quite relaxed cloak which protects Constantine’s modesty. The plinth supporting his seat, is out of sight. A full sculptural throne, although the emperor’s appearance hints at it, would surely have been de trop!

The original sculpture was in Parian marble and, it is thought, gilded bronze. In the reconstruction, cloak, sceptre and orb all take on a similar glitter, which gives the work a mixed media look which is surprisingly contemporary.

For me there is a point of comparison between the Colossus of Constantine and Gazing Ball (Farnese Hercules), a 2013 work by art star Jeff Koons. The Gazing Ball series was to bring together plaster sculptures or a range of figures (by no means all classical) with electric blue, glass spheres all of which are the size of a football.

Hercules, while nude, wears the armature of rippling muscle. Less than a quarter of the height of Constantine, he still stands more than 10ft. And while the plasterwork is chalky and as glaringly white as any monument in Rome, his titular orb is reflective offering a portrait in a convex mirror to gallery visitors who may encounter this, or any of these works from the 2010s.

I’d wager that Koons himself, if he was to see this reproduction, might give up on emulating classicism. It is simply too epic, too full of historic meaning and even in his status as replica, Constantine reigns from the great beyond. Yes, he is artificial, but his third century representation as a serene, all-powerful 42 ft seated god was hardly anchored in reality in the first place. The emperor’s latest incarnation is still filled with the spirit of ancient Rome, a spirit which cannot be said to have ever left us.

The ‘Colosso di Costantino’ is free to view at Villa Caffarelli until the end of 2025.

Goiing underground in Maharashtra

I took a boat from India Gate to Elephanta Island, exchanging the dense throng of cars and bikes for a vast company of lively ferry passengers sweating in the Chirstmas-time sun. Our boat left the mainland and we chugged along for a full hour before reaching a quay on Mumbai’s neighbouring rock, where a young guide attached himself to me with a persistent level of ingratiating chat about cricket. I knew nothing about cricket, but he was not perturbed. He was as persistent as various hawkers who lined the steps from ferry dock to a fifth century rock-cut cave complex, which gave its name to the island.

The portico for this warren appeared sunk into a green hillside. The seven columns were as squat as legs from two giant pachyderms. They shared a dusty yellow hue with the rocky hillock behind them. These legs were the first glimpse of an achievement by the workers who more than 1500 years ago, in their hundreds surely, chiseled a deep, cavernous structure out of solid rock. The dark spaces hinted at what might lie inside.

I was left very little time to speculate as my guide marched me through the nearest recess and toured me around the depths of the 39m long cave, stopping only briefly to take in a towering statue of Shiva which showed the goddess in all her forms as the Creator, the Preserver and the Destroyer; each of Shiva’s faces had two names and, oh, here were seven more gods whose names stretched to a total of 43 syllables.

It was 2018 and I was in the earlier stages of a PhD about the representation of prehistoric caves. And, like the good academic she is, Prof D took this venture very seriously and arranged for me to see two more such caves in Maharashtra. Much like the Elephanta cave complex, the state’s two-part attraction, Ellora and Ajanta caves, do not date back to before any known civilisation. In this way, they differ from the prehistoric painted caves of France and Spain. Yet all three UNESCO sites are still staggering, and staggeringly ancient: at once crowded, and yet well off the beaten track, for me at least, when compared with the Dordogne.

Visits to these Indian caves are not regulated in the same way as their palaeolithic counterparts in Europe. Tourists are free to roam, and, at Ellora, Prof D and I were to thread our way around what must be one of the world’s largest, and perhaps only, immersive sculptures made out of basalt. To be in the largest space, Kailash Temple, felt like being at the bottom of a quarry, surrounded by a phalanx of stone elephants. Beyond these, the cast of sombre gods, whose figures we passed below and between, looked on in sublime indifference to our wonder.

In my mind’s eye, Ellora is two realms. In the open air it is baking and parched, a scrub with paths worn around the complex between the opening to cave after cave. These number more than 100, which gives the site an epic scale not totally unlike a theme park or a zoo. The carvings pertain to three major Indian religions, Jainism and Buddhism as well as Hinduism. If you time it right, you can ride a minibus to the further reaches. Beyond this setting of dry trees, dust and rock, are the dark, cool hollowed out spaces in which the casual tourist can never know what to expect.

But then again, how might a casual tourist even reach a tourist sight like this. The next day our casual status was tested by a three-hour, axle-punishing drive to Ajanta. Dating to the second century BCE, this complex is older than Ellora and Elephanta. It is solely Buddhist. At one time, the 30 grottoes there comprised a highly decorated monastery. And yet by casual accident, a nineteenth century Britisher ‘discovered’ the cave: a cavalry officer with the forgettable name John Smith.

Although the site was well known to locals, in 1819, J.S. stumbled across Ajanta in the course of a tiger hunt and proceeded to carve his boring name, in full, across the painting of a serene bodhisattva, who, like the local tigers, had never done him any harm. ‘He’s a total asshole!’, you might be thinking, and you might have a point. But, by this simple act of vandalism, he seems to prove that imperialism has a philosophy and practice as developed and rewarding to its adherents as the teachings of Buddha.

Ajanta is a string of monastic cells, forming an ambulatory sequence along an uneven path around a cliff face. It has more subtle charms than the gigantically carved caves we had seen so far. It has paintings and engravings pertaining to sutras, godheads, and divine plans. One inspects the ruins of these images in the glow cast by low level lighting, or the torch on a phone. The parietal works at Ajanta repay the time spent in queues and, even given the crowds, can still evoke the Buddhist calm, and thus retain some of their holy purpose.

I’m afraid Prof D and I find ourselves on a path of devout agnosticism. Whether in India or in Europe we embrace the chance to enter temples, churches and shrines. At Ajanta we embraced three dozen such spaces. Visitors are free to work their way along one side of a valley surrounding the River Waghur and to hunt in the semi-darkness for icons and expressions of longstanding faith.

We may be among the last to do so. Construction is underway on a suite of replica caves, attached to the visitor centre here at Ajanta. If you’re at all able to visit for yourself, you have two options: 1) be quick before they find the necessary funds to replicate the experience and close a number of caves to the public, or 2) enjoy the replica, as I was able to do at Lascaux, and receive a vivid picture of the works which, ironically, will offer you the best possible view.

Via replica, you may reach Satori, and you will see Ajanta in a way that a buddhist in the second century BCE could only dream of! Indeed it joins the global ranks of heritage sites which have doubled and, even, via second-hand reports like this, tripled.

Trip was in December 2018. Image is from Ajanta Caves.