David Blackburn

Take a look at John Maynard Keynes’s armchair

Discoveries: Art, Science and Exploration marks the first time Cambridge university's eight museums are collaborating

[Getty Images/Shutterstock/iStock/Alamy] 
issue 15 February 2014

Discoveries: Art, Science and Exploration at Two Temple Place (until 27 April) is like a giant cabinet of curiosities. Maps, gizmos and memorabilia are spread across two floors of this glorious high-Victorian building on the Embankment. There are drawings from doomed polar expeditions, bones and teeth of fish from the Woodwardian Collection (see above), early botanical diagrams, hoards of medieval gold, the loot of empire (the Sufi snakes-and-ladders board in ebony and mother-of-pearl is memorable) and John Maynard Keynes’s armchair.

The exhibits are drawn from the eight museums of the University of Cambridge. Much is made of the fact that this is the first time the university’s museums have collaborated — not bad for an institution that is 800 years old. Discoveries made me want to revisit Cambridge, which might be the point of this collaboration.

The diversity of the exhibits makes it impossible to impose any order on this show; but that is its delight.

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