Читать книгу A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East онлайн

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In fact, the current inaccessibility of the ruins is already leading to a resurgence in the consideration of records from times long gone. Old paintings, and slightly less old photographs, are now being rediscovered as important sources on the preservation of the site in the early modern period. In late 2015, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington DC organized a small exhibition of eighteenth-century engravings and nineteenth-century photographs which had undergone sepia toning. In 2016, an exhibition at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne focused on representations of Palmyra by the French artist Louis-Francois Cassas, whose exquisite drawings were made during a one-month visit in 1785 and published in the first of three volumes recording his Levantine illustrations (Bredekamp et al. 2016). From November 2016 until February 2017, an exhibition on “Palmyra, city of the thousand columns” was organized in Deventer, a small town in the east of the Netherlands where the western fascination with Palmyra had begun when Gisbert Cuper, Deventer’s mayor at the end of the seventeenth century, commissioned a large (4 m) painting of the ruins from the Dutch artist Gerard Hofstede van Essen, who had participated in a British expedition to Palmyra in 1693. One year later the painting, “Zicht op Palmyra” (View toward Palmyra) arrived in Cuper’s house and – now hanging in the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam – remains the oldest portrayal of the oasis ruins. Most recently, the Getty Research Institute has launched its first online exhibition on The Legacy of Ancient Palmyra.