Walk around and admire the Mughals from your couch
History buffs can now walk around and admire art and historical artefacts from the comfort of their home.
The real OG aka the British Museum opened its doors to the public in 1759 and is still showing us how it’s done today. The museum’s website has stellar graphics and lets you tap through a musical guide to different continents and time periods.
Not only does it have the Rosetta Stone (or a broken part of a bigger stone slab) which has a message carved into it written in three different scripts, including Egyptian and Greek, but it takes you the Enlightenment era (room 1) and the Islamic World (room 42 and 43).
Navigating the website is easy. You have two options, a virtual walk or collection explorer. If you’re interested, you can also check out the museum via Google Street View.
In room 33, The Sir John Hotung Gallery, reside iconic artefacts from the Ming dynasty on one side and seals from the Indus Valley civilization on the other. The museum’s South Asia collection is like non other. Not only does it have a steatite stamp seal with a carved bull from Harappa, Pakistan, but it also has painting and objects from the court of Mughal emperors can be seen alongside 20th-century paintings, including by the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.
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The a small room next door, Room 33a, is dedicated to Amaravati in south-east India, was one of the most important Buddhist sites in India. Buddhism originated in north India and spread to other parts of the subcontinent in the third century BC.
If you haven’t been able to find what you’re looking for at the British Museum, just pop over to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s website. While the museum doesn’t have a virtual tour as such, their collection has been digitised by Google Arts and Culture.
The VA’s South and South East Asia collection has more than 60,000 objects, including textiles, paintings, from the subcontinent. One of the featured artefacts includes a turban ornament from the Mughal empire. It is a beautiful piece of jewellery with gold, diamonds, rubies and emeralds.
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One of the most fascinating objects from the collection is Tipu’s Tiger made for Mysore’s Tipu Sultan.
According to the museum, the tiger, an almost life-sized wooden semi-automaton, mauls a European soldier lying on his back. “Concealed inside the tiger’s body, behind a hinged flap, is an organ which can be operated by turning the handle next to it. This simultaneously makes the man’s arm lift up and down and produces noises intended to imitate his dying moans,” read the website.
“Tigers and tiger stripes were part of the decoration of Tipu Sultan’s possessions and anything made to proclaim his rule or personal association. Jewelled gold tiger head finials were on his throne, and tiger stripes were stamped onto his coinage, and his swords and guns incorporated tiger heads and stripes in their forms and ornamentation. Small bronze mortars made for his army were in the shape of crouching tigers, and the men who fired lethal iron-cased rockets against the British wore tunics with stripes woven into the fabric.”
The VA also has a collection of Bollywood posters and works by Lahore-born artist A. R. Chughtai and Imran Qureshi.
You can also watch the museum’s conservation team as they
clean and repair a spectacular 19th-century jama in preparation for its
display.
Many museums and galleries might have closed their doors amid the coronavirus pandemic but they have made their collections available online.
For example, the Guggenheim Museum in NYC and Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum are accessible via Google Street View. You can also check out the Anne Frank Museum through a virtual tour which shows you the where Anne wrote her diary.
Article source: https://www.samaa.tv/lifeandstyle/2020/04/walk-around-and-admire-the-mughals-from-your-couch/