Since the 17th century, when young gentlemen of means started making the Grand Tour of Europe, ancient marble sculptures have adorned the houses of collectors. Once the preserve of the very wealthy, these beautiful works of art are now accessible to a much wider audience.
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An expert overview of the category, and advice to first-time buyers from Christie’s Pre-Columbian art specialist Fatma Turkkan-Wille.
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Once a friend to Dali, Picasso and Warhol, Fayez Barakat is one of the world’s most prominent art collectors. In a rare interview, he tells his life story, and why he has switched from collecting to creating.
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I had always been attracted to Biblical and Classical antiquities for this reason, but nothing in my previous experience prepared me for the surprising, exotic, intimate, and sometimes barbaric world that Pre-Columbian art reveals.
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Outside of any well-endowed museum, the Barakat Gallery Collection proves to be one of the finest assemblages of its kind. Marvelous sculptures from the world’s most ancient of civilizations, exquisite glass vessels, figures of ancient gods and goddesses, as well as priceless jewelry make this collection a rarity.
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Bronze. The word itself has musical resonance, like the ringing of a bell. An alloy of copper and tin, this fabled metal has been prized through the centuries for its strength and beauty. Many of the great treasures of human culture have been shaped in this warm and enduring material.
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Jewelry is said to be one of life's luxuries, but it is virtually impossible to imagine the world without it. The adoration of ornament is as old as civilization itself. Once mankind obtained the basic necessities of life, he began to adorn himself with rare, unusual and beautiful objects.
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Barakat runs a fifth-generation family business in art of the antiquities, running galleries in Beverly Hills and London as well as a museum in Amman, Jordan. The first Barakat Gallery in Asia is officially opening in Samcheong-dong, Seoul, on Monday.
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You can tell a lot about a culture by how they bury their dead. In the case of Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) China, the sculptural figures found in tombs tell the story of everyday life more than 500 years ago. To find out more about these curious sculptures, we went to Lofty expert Amanda Miller, a specialist in Chinese and Japanese decorative arts with more than a decade of auction house experience, for the scoop on these buried treasures.
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Coins. Reach into any pocket or purse and you’re certain to find a few. They are an integral part of daily life, so ubiquitous that we rarely think about them. Few objects are as universally employed by human culture. Throughout the world, every civilized society uses coins as a medium of exchange. Coins serve as a kind of propaganda, an advertisement for the aims and ambitions of the people who mint them.
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It may be easy for us to project our modern idea of beauty onto the ancient Egyptians. But given that their culture was so fundamentally different from our own and that their everyday customs were imbued with powerful religious symbolism completely alien to modern sensibilities, we must not act so fast.
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"Antiquity." The term has undeniable connotations: it suggests something beautiful, something rare, something valuable. Occasionally one is given the special pleasure of encountering a given object that is in every way exceptional – one to which all the connotations of beauty, rarity, and value clearly apply.
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