Crouching Artist, Hidden Cobra

Carol Adlam, Mary Amelia Cummins Harvey Visiting Fellow Commoner, views Girton’s antiquities from a new angle

An artist’s eye view is much like a worm’s, I thought to myself as I shuffled my bottom along the parquet floor of the Lawrence Room, getting as close as possible to eye level with Hermione Grammatike, the mummy of a two-thousand-year-old woman who died when she was no older than a Girton undergraduate. I was fortunate enough to have been invited there by Dr Gillian Jondorf to spend some time drawing Girton’s extraordinary museum of objects, art, paintings, sculptures and mummies (in addition to Hermione there are two tiny crocodiles).

Observational drawing underpins all my work. I draw wherever I go, to document a passing moment, and to see the intricate complexity of the world around me. It can be awkward and time-consuming and physically taxing. But it can also be revelatory. The way we look at objects in a museum is constrained by certain parameters – our height, the position of a display case, lighting, the presence of other viewers and so forth. In my own work I’ve made a habit of pushing at these parameters. And so I lay next to Hermione. At eye level I could measure the depth of the diamond lattice tape that encases her. I could sense the tilt and solidity of her head, the way her shoulders lay on her death bed.

Next to Hermione there is a case containing funerary figurines (shabti) and a wooden figure in the form of a walking woman (LR.41–44; LR.408). Viewed from the front, as viewers would conventionally see them, the shabtis (to my mind) do not say much; instead, the neatness of their spacing reinforces the impression of stasis, rigidity. But from the side, they come to life. Drawing them, I saw the variation in their facial features and admired the small chisel cuts that make a frown on one and describe a plump chin on another. I saw the mask-like band of eye make-up on a third. And as I drew the fragments of hieroglyphics that were visible from my point of view, I realised that I was repeating a pattern and that they were the same – all the inscriptions on the shabtis start with a walking figure, a crook, the sun, and the eye of Horus.

Hermione at eye level

I turned my attention to other objects. I admired the precision of the minuscule fingers of Isis as she cradles the back of the head of her son Harpokrates who sits on her lap (the whole thing no larger than a few centimetres) (LR.108). I caught a flash of iridescent green in a Roman unguentarium that has turned white over time (LR.819). I drew the happy coincidence of object, light and shadow that turned a procession of marching boars, tortoises, dog, and goat into a double image (LR.779–784).

I was about to leave when the Tang dynasty Horse and Rider in the corner cabinet caught my eye (LR.1056). It is apparently a mystery even to experts in the field, who have hypothesised that the figure on it is a clown, possibly female. The figure appears to be laughing, and the horse is at full gallop.

Horse and Rider is extraordinary. Drawing it revealed to me that it is composed of twisting planes, orientated around a central point – the tiny strip of white which is the stirrup on which the rider’s foot is braced. This stirrup is the single point that allows the Rider’s body to twist and brace itself backwards, its torque turning away from the twisted neck of the horse. But what could be causing this explosive moment, I wondered? I drew the horse’s Shadow procession teeth, its mouth set in an expression that looked to me panic-stricken, and I was puzzled.

The Shabt

Shadow procession

Horse and rider

I drew the Rider’s body, and the strange object that is draped over his or her shoulder. At first I thought it was merely decorative, some sort of drape, perhaps a scarf. But then I realised that it twists under the Rider’s arm, and that its end section is not merely rising in the wind but is lifting itself of its own accord.

To test my hypothesis, I squeezed myself as low down as I could, as closely as I could to the Rider’s body, and looked up, at an angle no casual visitor to the museum will ever see. I saw nostrils, the trace of a hood at the side, and a pair of little black eyes.

The object draped around the Rider is a snake – perhaps a cobra. Girton’s zoologist Fellow, Dr Arik Kershenbaum, has suggested that this may be a representation of the venomous Chinese cobra, Naja atra. It would need a sinologist to say what the cultural significance of the snake might be. Perhaps such a fearsome snake indicates that the Rider is a warrior. Or perhaps the snake has appeared unexpectedly, as it does in the Chinese Zodiac, in which, the story goes, it gains advantage in the race of time by smuggling itself around a horse’s leg and then dropping to the ground as the horse crosses the finish line.

My worm’s-eye artist’s view gives me no insights into these questions. But it does allow me to see overlooked or neglected details, to make new connections, and in this case, to spot the cobra that has been hiding in plain sight for over a century in the heart of Girton College.