Aspects of Beauty: Hellenistic Gold Jewellery in the Benaki Museum Collections

Dr Monica Jackson

This is a hybrid event.

This lecture reflects upon my research in the Benaki Museum, culminating in a book published in 2017. The story begins in the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria Egypt during the late 19th – early 20th centuries, where the collecting instincts of Antonis Benakis (1873-1954) the founder of the Benaki Museum were shaped.

Selected pieces examined in the Museum’s laboratory under the optical microscope, provide compelling evidence that individual jewellers may be identified by certain idiosyncrasies of technique. Ancient jewels individually conceived and meticulously crafted have stories to tell and layers of meaning previously unobserved and unsuspected.

About the speaker

Dr Monica Jackson is an expert on ancient Greek jewellery and a lecturer specialising in the Mediterranean, Aegean and Black Sea areas. She has participated in excavations in Greece, Cyprus and further east, with a particular area of research in Hellenistic gold jewellery. Dr Jackson has lectured extensively about this topic in Australia, the USA and England.

Her latest work is a book on the jewellery housed in the famous Benaki Museum in Athens, Hellenistic Gold Jewellery in the Benaki Museum Athens which contains 130 beautiful photographs which accompany Dr Jackson’s analysis.  Dr Jackson will not only talk of pieces from the collection at this talk but also give an insight into the Benaki family itself.

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More information
Please contact yvonne.inall@sydney.edu.au to be added to the mailing list for future seminars.

This event is jointly hosted by AAIA and the Consulate General of Greece, Sydney, Australia.