It's a Small World

I was in San Francisco last weekend for my professional organization's annual meeting. I was fortunate to have a pretty relaxed meeting: no paper to give, no job interviews...just dealing with administrative responsibilities related to my summer program, meeting up with friends, visiting with former professors, etc.

Dave flew out to SF at the conclusion of the conference so that we could take a mini-vacation together! Our first stop was the De Young Museum, which I had long heard about but never visited. The art there is mainly focused on the Americas/Africa/Oceania, which is far outside my realm of knowledge. Maybe it's because I really only know about Classical art, but I enjoyed seeing several objects at the De Young that reminded me of popular motifs in ancient Mediterranean art.

The museum holds amazing murals from Teotihuacan, Mexico (600-800 AD). Here's an image of two bristly coyotes attacking a deer:

The deer attack is a pretty common motif in archaic Greek art, and here we have a lion attacking a bull (similar motif) on the walls at Persepolis!

We also saw these neat Inuit or Eskimo boat models:

...which are quite similar to the kind of ancient Egyptian boat models that are fairly common grave goods:

And my favorite comparandum is this Inuit storage box, with a polar bear lid:

And the type of Greek pyxis from the Geometric period that has a horse handle:

Anyway, nothing profound or scholarly to say about any of this – I'm no art historian, and surely any kind of generalization about this sort of thing would be wrong. But it's pretty neat-o!