The Museum of Classical Archaeology is a museum in

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

, run by the Faculty of Classics of the

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

. Since 1983, it has been located in a purpose-built gallery on the first floor of the Faculty of Classics on the

Sidgwick Site The Sidgwick Site is one of the largest sites within the University of Cambridge, England. Overview and history The Sidgwick Site is located on the western side of Cambridge city centre, near the Backs. The site is north of Sidgwick Avenue an ...

of the university. The museum is one of the few surviving collections of

plaster cast A plaster cast is a copy made in plaster of another 3-dimensional form. The original from which the cast is taken may be a sculpture, building, a face, a pregnant belly, a fossil or other remains such as fresh or fossilised footprints – p ...

s of ancient

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

and

Roman sculpture The study of Roman sculpture is complicated by its relation to Greek sculpture. Many examples of even the most famous Greek sculptures, such as the Apollo Belvedere and Barberini Faun, are known only from Roman Imperial or Hellenistic "copies". At ...

in the world. The collection consists of several hundred casts, including casts of some of the most famous surviving ancient Greek and Roman sculptures. Noteworthy casts include those of the ''

Laocoön and His Sons The statue of ''Laocoön and His Sons'', also called the Laocoön Group ( it, Gruppo del Laocoonte), has been one of the most famous ancient sculptures ever since it was excavated in Rome in 1506 and placed on public display in the Vatican Museums ...

'', the

Farnese Hercules The ''Farnese Hercules'' ( it, Ercole Farnese) is an ancient statue of Hercules, probably an enlarged copy made in the early third century AD and signed by Glykon, who is otherwise unknown; the name is Greek but he may have worked in Rome. Like ...

, the

Barberini Faun The life-size ancient but much restored marble statue known as the ''Barberini Faun'', ''Fauno Barberini'' or ''Drunken Satyr'' is now in the Glyptothek in Munich, Germany. A faun is the Roman equivalent of a Greek satyr. In Greek mythology, saty ...

and ''

Charioteer of Delphi The ''Charioteer of Delphi'', also known as ''Heniokhos'' ( el, Ἡνίοχος, the rein-holder), is a statue surviving from Ancient Greece, and an example of ancient bronze sculpture. The life-size (1.8m) Janson, H.W. (1995) ''History of Art' ...

''. The

Peplos Kore The Peplos Kore is one of the most well-known examples of Archaic Greek art. Kore is a type of archaic Greek statue that portray a young woman with a stiff posture looking straight forward. Although this statue is one of the most famous examples ...

is perhaps the best known exhibit in the museum. It is a plaster cast of an ancient Greek statue of a young woman painted brightly as the original would have been, which was set up on the

Acropolis of Athens The Acropolis of Athens is an ancient citadel located on a rocky outcrop above the city of Athens and contains the remains of several ancient buildings of great architectural and historical significance, the most famous being the Parthenon. Th ...

, around 530 BCE. In 1975, the museum attempted to replicate the sculpture's original appearance by painting a cast of the figure. The replica was then displayed next to a second, unpainted cast as a challenge to the erroneous equation of ancient Greek sculpture with pure white marble. The museum also holds a large collection of

sherds This page is a glossary of archaeology, the study of the human past from material remains. A B C D E F ...

and epigraphic squeezes. The museum is open to the public Tuesday to Friday: 10.00am to 5.00pm and on Saturdays in University term time: 10.00am to 1.00pm. The museum is one of eight which make up the University of Cambridge Museums consortium. Its former home on Little St Mary's Lane was designed by

Basil Champneys Basil Champneys (17 September 1842 – 5 April 1935) was an English architect and author whose most notable buildings include Manchester's John Rylands Library, Somerville College Library (Oxford), Newnham College, Cambridge, Lady Margaret Hall, ...

in 1883. In the 1970s it became evident that it was no longer adequate to house the collection, and it is now part of the buildings of

Peterhouse Peterhouse is the oldest constituent college of the University of Cambridge in England, founded in 1284 by Hugh de Balsham, Bishop of Ely. Today, Peterhouse has 254 undergraduates, 116 full-time graduate students and 54 fellows. It is quite o ...

References

External links

Museum of Classical Archaeology website

Classical Archaeology Classical archaeology is the archaeological investigation of the Mediterranean civilizations of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. Nineteenth-century archaeologists such as Heinrich Schliemann were drawn to study the societies they had read about i ...

Institutions in the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Cambridge Museum of Classical Archaeology Sculpture galleries in the United Kingdom Art museums and galleries in Cambridgeshire Collections of classical sculpture Museums in Cambridge Archaeological museums in England Museums of ancient Rome in the United Kingdom Museums of ancient Greece in the United Kingdom Plaster cast collections {{Cambridgeshire-struct-stub