MORE ON THE HADRIAN EXHIBITION:

From the Guardian:

So many exhibitions talk big then give you a few casts and copies and wall texts. This show delivers: it is an archaeological treasury whose beauty is the result of exceptional loans of some of the supreme works of Roman art from the Capitoline and Vatican museums in Rome, the Louvre in Paris, and new archaeological finds such as a colossus of Hadrian, excavated recently in Turkey. There are handwritten letters from the Jewish rebel leader Simon Bar Kokhba, and a papyrus fragment on which is written the Alexandrian poet Pankrates's celebration of a lion hunt where Hadrian deliberately missed his own shot, in order "to test to the full the sureness of aim/ Of his beauteous Antinous".

The Romans lived as if history were a book that concerned them - they displayed their flaws and crimes as proof that they belonged on its pages. The darkest stories and judgments on them are to be found in their own histories: see this, then read the Annals of Tacitus. This exhibition has the realism and the grandeur you find in Tacitus. Under the blue dome of the Victorian Reading Room inspired by Hadrian's architectural masterpiece, the Pantheon, Roman art at long last gets its triumph.

From Reuters:

Hadrian has echoes today
Wed Jul 23, 2008 8:47am BST

By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON, July 22 (Reuters Life!) - He had his fingers burned in ancient Iraq, fought insurrections on several fronts and built a huge wall to protect a fractious frontier, but still had time to boost the economy and leave major artistic legacies.

Many of the trials and tribulations that faced Rome's emperor Hadrian nearly 2,000 years ago still resonate today.

"The conflict zones in Hadrian's day are the conflict zones of today," said Thorsten Opper, curator of a new exhibition, "Hadrian - Empire and conflict" at London's British Museum.

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