Art

After the success of giving over the Reading Room to the Terracotta Army (‘The First Emperor’ was the BM’s most popular exhibition since King Tut in 1972), the British Museum has returned to the more familiar antiquities of the Roman Empire with a new display devoted to the Emperor Hadrian.

Now,  Hadrian’s reign is relatively unmined territory but Rome itself is anything but, and the exhibition is not going to have anything like the draw of the mysterious Terracotta Army. So the BM has decided to increase interest by striving towards topicality – the subtitle of the exhibition could be taken from a Noam Chomsky book, and there is much play of an ‘insurgency’ in what is ‘present-day Iraq’ – all this, plus the fact that the numerous busts of Hadrian show him to be the spitting image of Rory McGrath.

Fortunately, these rather heavy-handed references do not detract from the exhibition as a whole, which has a scale and breadth in keeping with an empire that was at the peak of its power. The museum has called in key exhibits from more than 30 institutions in a dozen countries, and many are spellbinding, from the spectacular – a mammoth statue of Hadrian recently unearthed in Turkey – to the moving – intimate items belonging to the individuals involved in the Jewish Revolt of AD 132. In this way, the personal brings relief to the political, and stops the exhibition from being overwhelmed by the preponderance of marble busts and chunks of aged masonry.

The museum also makes good use of the Reading Room space – much better than ‘The First  Emperor’, which stuck up a false ceiling creating a horrible cramped atmosphere – emphasising the fact that it is closely modelled on Rome’s Pantheon, which Hadrian rebuilt in AD 120.