Category: Art History

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MANCENT blog: A Chinese Garden in North Staffordshire

Birgitta Hoffmann

Last week I went to #Biddulph Grange Garden in Staffordshire. Created by James Bateman in between the 1830s and 1860s, who displayed many of the plants that had been collected by the plant expeditions to Asia and America that he financed in the garden Since the 1960s it has been restored and maintained by the #NationalTrust. It is a glorious exercise in creating lots of themed gardens in comparatively little space. Most people go for the glorious Dahlias, but the idea for me was to have a look at the Chinese Garden which I want to include in my day school on #China in the 19th century for MANCENT. It is one of the first attempts in Britain to create a Classical Chinese garden similar to those of the World Heritage Site at Suzhou. Given the problems of the available descriptions and limited range of images and plants that could be used, it is a truly beautiful piece of reception (strange mistakes notwithstanding), copying the main elements of the Lake, the Wilderness, and the meandering ways for contemplation, as well as the viewing terrace and even an isolated teahouse. Even the axis towards a tall feature in the distance is there (alas not a pagoda, but a monkey puzzle tree).
The relationship between China and the West in the 19th century was fraught, no doubt about it. But it is also worth remembering that in between these mountains of problems, there were people who were trying to engage with the Chinese culture and tried to understand it better.

If you want to know more tickets are still available and can be got via the website or via Eventbrite.

View from the ‘Wilderness’ and the Teahouse towards the lake.
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Why talk about Silkroad in the Indian Ocean?

Birgitta Hoffmann

Everybody knows the Silkroad. Originally, we thought it went overland from Xi’an to the Mediterranean. But this is only one of many, many routes that were used since about 6000 BC to facilitate long-distance exchange between Africa, Asia (including the Western Pacific) and Europe. Today we know these routes were a huge network, forever changing and adapting to political and climate change, but always driven by the need to carry goods and ideas from one end of the world to the other.

One of the biggest parts of this network is the Maritime Routes and the Indian Ocean and in the middle of it, the Indian Subcontinent is a crucial turntable for this trade.

According to the ancient sources the biggest harbour in the South of India, in the area now known as Kerala was Muziris or Muchiri in the Tamil texts. During the Roman Period goods were brought here from the West and fortunes could be made by bringing Indian produce from spices to Cotton to Gemstone back. in 2009 the Archaeologists found this site at a place known as Pattanam, which means the harbour/port. The picture shows some of the amphora found at the site, but I also could have shown you pictures of gemstones and the remains of a wharf and store buildings.


Pattanam is probably the best-known of the sites that were discovered in the last 20 years of research into the Maritime Silkroad in India and I really look forward to talking about these new discoveries in my Course on the Silkroad trade in the Indian Ocean on Thursdays for MANCENT 
The course is online and recorded and open to international enrolment via Eventbrite and thanks to the recordings available at a time convenient for you.

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MANCENT 2023 Programme now out

Just in time for the bank holiday weekend, MANCENT is publishing its Autumn programme.

Courses will start in September and there is a wide range of humanities courses from Music to literature to History and Archaeology.

We are also reviving our Cultural day trips to various museums and sites and hope that will once again prove popular.

The full programme is on the website and can be booked either by contacting the lecturers or with many of them the online courses via Eventbrite links, which are very popular with our overseas students.

All the best and we look forward to seeing you soon at one of our events.

Birgitta Hoffmann
MANCENT Course Director and her team.

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Why study Greek and Roman Myths by Tony Keen

Whenever I visit the National Gallery in London, I always stop in front of Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1520-1523). It is one of my favourite paintings ever because mythologically it’s so rich.

Most mythological paintings of the sixteenth century and later draw upon the work of the Roman poet Ovid and his fifteen-book epic the Metamorphoses. Titian (full name Tiziano Vecelli) certainly drew upon Ovid’s work for paintings that came late in his career such as Diana and Callisto, Diana and Actaeon, and the Death of Actaeon. But the source for Bacchus and Ariadne, painted when Titian was in his thirties, was not the Metamorphoses. Ovid does mention the story, but not in detail. The best-known version of the tale is in an earlier poet, Gaius Valerius Catullus. Catullus’ poems were mostly short, but a small collection of longer poems survive. Of these, the longest is Poem 64. A ‘mini-epic’ of 408 lines, it covers a number of mythological accounts, including that of Bacchus and Ariadne.

Ariadne was a daughter of King Minos of Crete. She aided the Athenian hero Theseus when he came to Crete to kill her half-brother, the half-man, half-bull Minotaur. Understandably, afterwards, she had to flee Crete with Theseus. But then, for reasons no account really explains properly, Theseus abandons Ariadne on the island of Naxos. This is the moment Titian dramatises.

Ariadne is caught waving towards the ship of Theseus, which can be seen on the horizon, sail billowing in the wind. But Ariadne is suddenly distracted by the coming of the god Bacchus (the Greek Dionysus), the god of wine and revelry. We see her having turned her head towards the new arrival.