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Cambridge Diary 16/03/11

Visited the Fitzwilliam Museum. Red and ochre marble columns and classical statues adorn the grand entrance hall. Downstairs there is a very good display of classical sculpture. Two richly decorated sarcophagi in white marble caught my eye: one with high relief of satyrs and figures dancing around three sides, the other carved in strigil design with a dancing girl at one end, a satyr at the other and a group of three figures in the middle These stand in amongst assorted nymphs, busts and funerary urns covered in symbols such as a water carrier, sheep's heads, and sea serpents.

Upstairs there was an exhibition of superb drawings from the collection, mostly Italian from the 15C onwards featuring Carracci, Il Guercino, Il Parmigianino, Tiepolo, Cambiaso, Caravaggio, da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Rosa, Piranesi (a brilliant fantastical landscape littered with skulls of man and beast) and many more, plus a few moderns, like Modigliani. I particularly liked the Cambiaso, a minimalist drawing of St Jerome, hand on skull, with an angel trumpeting into his ear and a cat in the foreground. In a nearby room was a collection of etchings from about the same time, including a fine piece 'Democritus in Meditation' by Salvatore Rosa, and prints by Reni and others.

Later we visited the delightful Kettle's Yard, which had changed little and retains its tranquil atmosphere with comfortable places to sit and contemplate the wonderful displays. Paintings by Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, David Jones and Christopher Wood rub shoulders with the sculpture of Gaudier-Brzeska, Brancusi and assorted china fragments, pebbles, shells and other strange objects.

Afterwards we walked up Castle St to Huntingdon Rd, where All Souls Lane leads off the highway to Ascension Cemetery. Two Nobel Prize winners, Cockcroft and Hopkins, are buried alongside physicists, including Max Perutz, astronomers, philosophers, engineers and knights of the realm. There was even one John Wisdom, philosopher. Somebody had carefully arranged an orange, a satsuma, a fork, and several bonbons on the partially overgrown slab commemorating Ludwig Wittgenstein, which also had a candle container with the Madonna and Child on it, and various coins.

NB. A strigil sarcophagus is a sarcophagus carved with S-shaped parallel grooves reminiscent of the marks left by strigils.