From Afar: Travelling Materials and Objects Exhibition at Louvre’s Petite Galerie

Starting September 22, 2021, the Louvre’s Petite Galerie will have the exhibition of ‘From Afar: Travelling Materials and Objects’. 

The Petite Galerie’s 6th season complements the cycle of exhibitions that the museum is dedicating, in 2021/2022, to discoveries and explorations of lands near and far: ‘Paris–Athens: The Birth of Modern Greece, 1675–1919’ (September 30, 2021–February 7, 2022) and ‘Pharaoh of Two Lands: The African Epic of the Napatan Kings’ (April 27–July 25, 2022). 

Through travelling materials and objects, the Petite Galerie’s new exhibition aims to tell the tale of the world and its peoples by describing exchanges between distant worlds – exchanges often far more ancient than the explorations of the 16th century. 

Materials brought from the ends of the earth 

From deepest antiquity, carnelian, lapis lazuli, ebony, and ivory circulated along trade routes: these materials were even more precious because they came from afar. Their fascination was enriched by the myths surrounding their origin. Their use became a manifestation of prestige, and the meaning of the works of art that employed them was thus enriched, modified, amplified. From the Head of Gudea, Prince of Lagash to a small lapis lazuli bead in the shape of a frog, the exhibition presents these materials in great variety. 

Ivory sculpture: carving the elephant’s tooth

Among the many materials supplied by nature to art are the teeth of large animals – hippopotamus, boar, narwhal, mammoth, and elephant. As part of the Petite Galerie’s accessibility outreach, this year visitors will have the opportunity to touch an elephant’s tusk. 

Portraits of animals come from afar

Not only stones, shells, and plants travelled between continents; so did live animals, often for political ends. The populace as well as artists discovered ostriches, giraffes, and elephants, which became objects of fascination. Manmade objects followed the same routes; beyond Europeans’ well-known yen for exoticism, this exhibition shows that these multiple round trips wove a more complex history. 

An object, a story 

Works of art came to life through the materials chosen by artists, but their story then underwent the hazards of travel, taste, and transformation. Forms, techniques, and themes intertwined to create new objects, reflecting all the complexity of our world as it could be perceived in Europe from the late Middle Ages on. Each work recounts a different story, from the long voyages, often still mysterious, of the Middle Ages, to far-flung trade, to the moment in the 16th century when the world globalized. In the 19th and 20th centuries, military and scientific expeditions provided still other sources of exchange and transfer.