Egyptian Art and Chronographs
An easy agenda this morning, the Osiris exhibition at the Rietberg
Museum and a dry run of our train departure tomorrow.
One of the nicer things about booking your Air BnB just up the
hill from your host (on the exquisite tram system) is how easy it is to
connect. It helps of course that the tram system is Swiss and runs within 30
seconds of the posted schedule. We hopped on at Zolikerberg at 9:22 and dragged
Chris about at Rehalp at 9:27.
After a nice Americano and croissant (finally called “cornutti,”
I’d been looking for that all over Italy, coming the closest in Milan with “brioche”)
second breakfast we caught another tram around the lake and over into an as yet
unexplored area of Zurich. Leafier, a bit fancier, this district is home to the
Rietberg Museum. In 1949, the citizens of Zurich voted on turning the Villa
Wesendonck into a museum for the collection of Baron Eduard von der Heydt which
was to be donated to the city. In 1952, the Museum Rietberg of the City of
Zurich opened its doors to the public.
The villa has an interesting past, including a period in which
Richard Wagner was a guest of Otto and Mathilde Wesendonck who had moved into
their villa in 1857. Patrons of the arts, they often hosted well-known and
rising talents. Wagner had fled to Zurich in 1849 after narrowly avoided arrest
for his participation in the May uprisings in Dresden. Wagner and his wife
Minna lived in a small cottage on the grounds, but judging from his letters of
the time, he was completely smitten with his hostess, so much so that he
presented Mathilde with the libretto of his opera “Tristan and Isolde” on New Year’s
Eve 1857.
This caused a crisis, Minna left Wagner, returning to her
family in Dresden, Wagner abandoned both of them and fled to Venice in August
of the following year and the Wesendoncks sold their villa and moved back to
Germany.
But the real purpose of our visit was not to follow in the
footsteps of Wagner, but rather to partake of the Osiris Exhibition, a superb
collection of 16 centuries worth of Egyptian artifacts recovered from the
sunken city of Thonis-Heracleion over the past 20 years.
In 1992, the IEASM (Institut Européen Archéologie
Sous-Marine) began a project to discover and investigate the site of Thonis-Heracleion,
a city in the Nile Delta that had spanned more than 3000 years of habitation. The
area had disappeared beneath the Mediterranean by the end of the 8th
century, due to subsidence of the soil by way of a bad combination of
water-logging and big stone buildings. Whether a tidal wave, tidal phenomenon
or earthquake contributed is up for debate.
Nonetheless, using ancient Christian texts describing a
thriving Greek and Roman city on the spot, archeologists began investigating,
finally discovering it in 2000. The resulting finds were spectacular, due mainly
to the preservation afforded by the sea and silt.
The exhibition offers more than 300 artifacts, from the Age
of the Pharaohs to the Greek Ptolemaic Period and concluding with the Roman
Empire. From stone sphinxes, all the way down to tiny Greek coins. Very well
presented and described, it was truly a world class show. No pictures allowed
sadly, so I stole this one from the web. Depicting Taweret (hippo/lion
goddess) and carved in graywacke (a
dark, coarse grained sandstone,) it was so incredibly detailed and smooth that
we all stood and stared and tried to understand how it was made.
The permanent collection includes many outstanding Chinese porcelains,
and carvings including some that were clearly lifted from the Norther Wei
Dynasty sites I’ve visited in Luoyang and Datong. Another vast collection of
Tibetan and Indian religious art resides in the main villa. Their modest set of
Japanese woodblock prints from the Hiroshige period reminded me why I would
love to collect them.
We spent a few hours soaking up all that culture and then caught
a train back to the Hauptbahnhof to have a look at how we will catch our train
tomorrow morning. Like every other station, this one has its nuances and we
figured why not have a look without our suitcases. Having a good idea of how to
proceed we left and walked up Bahnhofstrasse, Zurich’s fancy shopping street. Because,
well, I wanted to window shop for watches.
In my experience, watches are sold (retail) in two ways – a big
watch emporium in a place like New York, Paris or Beijing, or independent brand
focused stores, also in big cities. The latter are usually tiny, and sometimes
sited in relationship with equivalent brands. Here, we here is different –
huge, one floor on a city block, devoted to a single brand, stores. In other
words, Candyland for me. We crisscrossed the street, fast-walking from Breguet
to Rolex to Chopard to Omega to Vacheron so I could stop and drool in front of
every window. It was simultaneously wonderful and more painful than I can
describe. Because while I might be able to convince myself that I have the
means, I certainly don’t have the will. So, I left it at imagining just how
beautiful that Blancpain Steel Flyback Chronograph Grande Date Léman with black
dial would look on my wrist.
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