London: (8) At The British Museum

Inside the British Museum. The circular construction on the right is the restored British Museum Reading Room, which stands in the centre of the Great Court. It's now a temporary space for major exhibitions. The Reading Room and its library were famously used by Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, George Orwell, Mahatma Gandhi, Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Lenin and Karl Marx.

Lely's Venus, named after the baroque portrait painter Sir Peter Lely (1618-80), who used to own it.  It's a Roman copy (from the 1st or 2nd century AD) of a Greek original (perhaps from the 2nd century BC). This is an absolutely beautiful statue of a naked Venus or Aphrodite, the goddess of love. She's been surprised while bathing, and crouches down, attempting to cover herself. You can't see it in this shot, but a water jar rests under her left thigh. Prior to this, only male statues were nude.

The Nereid Monument, a tomb in the form of a Greek temple from Xanthos in present-day Turkey. This façade was reconstructed from ruins discovered in the 19th century and shipped over to England.

Greek sculptures of female figures from the Parthenon in Athens. The figure on the right may be Aphrodite, reclining on the lap of her mother, Dione. Note the wonderfully-sculpted folds of the garments. These figures form part of the collection known as the Elgin Marbles, so-called because the Earl of Elgin brought them from Greece to England in 1816. This remains a controversial issue.

Part of the frieze from the Temple of Apollo in Bassae, Greece. This block shows part of a battle between the Greeks and the Amazons, who were all-female warriors.

I'm not exactly sure what this object is: perhaps a totemic wooden shield from the Pacific region? Or some kind of talismanic effigy?

Turquoise mosaic of a double-headed serpent from Mexico, carved in wood. This is an iconic piece of Aztec art.

 Serpent imagery occurs throughout the religious iconography of Mesoamerica. The serpent is associated with several Mexica deities including Quetzalcoatl (Feathered Serpent), Xiuhcoatl (Fire Serpent) and Mixcoatl (Cloud Serpent) or Coatlicue (She of the Serpent Skirt), the mother of the Mexica god Huitzilopochtli. The habit of snakes to shed their skin each year probably led to them being used to convey ideas concerning renewal and transformation. Likewise the ability of many species to move freely between water, earth and the forest canopy helped underline their symbolic role as intermediaries between the different layers of the cosmos (underworld, earth and sky).

The British Museum