One of the greatest stories ever told beckons all ages at the Ashmolean

I was obsessed by Greek and Roman mythology as a child. While my peers delighted in Barbie dolls, dinosaurs or Matchbox cars I could recite the 12 labours of Hercules and pretended to be a priestess of Vesta with my imaginary sisters. As you can imagine, this was not a recipe for childhood popularity, though I’m pretty sure it did lay the foundations for a career that turned out to be, ultimately, all about story telling. 

One of the greatest of those Ancient Greek stories is that of the Minotaur, the fierce half-man, half-bull creature imprisoned in a maze in Crete and fed on the war booty of young Athenians until the hero Theseus navigates the Labyrinth and kills the man eater. The brilliance of the current exhibition on the topic at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is that it’s all about the story. 

An unprecedented loan from the museum at Heraklion, modern capital of Crete near the ruins of Knossos, means you’ll probably never see this many top-quality Minoan artefacts in one place without getting on a plane to Greece. One hundred of the objects on display have never left the country before. And I doubt anyone has done a better job of untangling the fact and fiction archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans twined together early in the 20th century. There are even arresting video installations that pull parts of the show into the realm of modern art. But the Ashmolean doesn’t major on any of this highbrow stuff. Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth & Reality pulls you in with the legend and keeps visitors of all ages interested with solid story telling. The art, history and learning come by osmosis.

You’re plunged into the story from the ticket desk, when designs covering the walls and a dog-legged path to the exhibition’s start make it feel like you’re in the labyrinth itself, stepping through a door and into a dark room to be confronted by the monster himself. This version is a near life-sized statue, a Roman copy of a Greek original. 

Over his shoulder runs a series of films that tell the whole set of stories surrounding the Knossos monster, with typography, graphics and pacing that will satisfy even the shortest attention span. Dig deeper, and this room emphasises the tale’s enduring grip on the imagination, from ancient vase decoration through a Picasso print and a labyrinth-inspired London Underground art installation, with plenty of detours into early Christian maze design, Renaissance painting and Baroque gardens. 

Like Troy, one of the most compelling features of Knossos was a “real or imaginary” debate. Did the cities actually exist, are had they simply been made up as settings for fantastical tales. Both showed up in ancient writings, but there was no trace of them in the modern world. After Heinrich Schliemann found and excavated Troy in the 1870s, the archaeological world fixated on Knossos, and found it soon after. Up until very recently, you would have learned that it was discovered and excavated by an Englishman named Arthur Evans. He’s still the first answer Google gives you to the “who discovered Knossos” question.

But that’s not quite right. The appropriately named Minos Kalokairinos should have the credit. The wealthy businessman and Knossos enthusiast, whose family owned part of the site suspected to hold the lost city, did the first excavation in 1878 and was confident of what he’d found. But politics got in the way. At the time, the Ottoman Turks owned Crete and treated the locals poorly. Any treasures unearthed would probably get transported to museums in Istanbul. 

But the Turks liked the English, and were happy to do a deal with Evans, who was the curator of this same Ashmolean Museum. As concerned as the locals by the possible removal of treasures, he didn’t start digging until after the Ottomans left in 1898. That, and the fact that Evans made sure a museum in nearby Heraklion was built to house the greatest of the treasures he unearthed, is probably why the Greeks don’t hate him in the way they loathe Lord Elgin for his legal (at the time) purchase and transport of the Parthenon marbles. 

But whether he meant to or not, Evans did steal something from Greece: Kalokairinos’ credit for discovering Knossos. Which is why it’s particularly appropriate that the museum he once directed is the one putting on this show, and working so hard to set history straight.

Once we clear up those details, it’s into the main gallery where a treasure trove of artefacts from the palace site unfurls. There are architectural fragments, wall paintings, pottery, furniture, jewellery and ceremonial axes. While Evans might have left most of the artefacts on Crete, he brought home what’s probably the best archive of documentation on the excavations in the world. So this exhibition is possibly even better than a trip to Heraklion when it comes to putting the artefacts in context, complete with beautifully drawn maps and cut-always from the exhibition.

Just as when I saw these treasures for the first time in Heraklion, I was stunned by a mastery of colour and design which makes these 3000+ objects almost modern. Colours and patterns might comfortably grace a set of linens today. The octopus and other sea life swirling across pottery wouldn’t look out of place in a chic kitchen store. The wall painting of olive trees is so close to William Morris’ willow pattern you have to wonder if the late Victorian designer saw and copied. 

And then there are other things that are profoundly alien. While the naked bull jumpers might just turn up in a death-defying YouTube stunt, and beg a connection to Spanish bull fighters, the bare-breasted priestesses holding wriggling, live snakes aloft in their gripped hands are undoubtably from a very different world.

There’s enough of the odd and the exceptional here to keep viewers of all ages interested. Unusually for me, I was in the company of three young people, all of whom found items to interest them here. The curators’ most obvious play for that audience, beyond the focus on storytelling itself, is to include one of the Assassin’s Creed games. Designers Ubisoft included a quest through the ruins of Knossos to slay the Minotaur in their Odyssey installment. In the exhibition, an enormous screen follows an ancient Greek heroine through the ruins to her confrontation with the monster while a display panel explains just how seriously the designers took the history and architecture, actually working with the Ashmolean to get things right.

Not only is this gallery a compelling and vivid bit of world building after seeing all the bits and pieces that would have furnished it, but it’s a real talking point for families. This was the part of the exhibition where my 13-year-old godson was most engaged, showing off his knowledge of the Minotaur and explaining details he’d taken in while playing the game. His mother had the revelation, for the first time, that gaming might be educational and not a complete waste of time. A win for everyone.

While the curators don’t pound the point home, the Ubisoft inclusion is also appropriate because this mix of history and imagination, with some artistic liberties taken to engage audiences, is exactly what Evans did 120 years ago. He rebuilt and restored the site in ways modern archeology would no longer tolerate, and made conclusions about the people and functions of the palace that were based as much on guesswork and personal preference as fact. Even the name we give to this culture … the Minoans … was made up by Evans rather than drawn from history. In my experience, one of the reasons that Knossos is so spectacular to visit is precisely because Evans’ world building gave us a colourful, tangible portal to a vividly imagined past. Whether it’s any more accurate than wandering through in Assassin’s Creed is still a matter of hot debate.

The final parts of the exhibition contain a gallery on newer discoveries in areas around the original excavation, and a video installation inspired by Evans’ fanciful restorations. The 18-minute ramble by Elizabeth Price is narrarated by imaginary, robotic curators who have been asked to clear up the hard drives of the Ashmolean and the neighbouring Pitt-Rivers museum. They draw unexpected, beautiful but often completely wrong conclusions from their mash up. Though meant, at its 2016  creation, to be a comment on what the restoration may have gotten wrong in Knossos, the automated voice prompted me to think about how AI might interpret and curate our artefacts of a world suddenly stripped of humans. It was very weird, but it’s now the thing from the exhibition I’d be most keen to see again.

I suspect I may indeed get back for a second viewing. While Labyrinth was great for a family outing, there’s a second layer of discovery I’d like to make with a longer, quieter visit. Like all great stories, multiple tellings reveal new things.

Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth and Reality is on at the Ashmolean until 30 July. 

Food and wine cross the centuries to bring Pompeii to life

The word for a Roman dinner party is a convivium; literally "a being together". A word we've absorbed into English to characterise a good time. The Romans' predecessors in central Italy, the Etruscans, often chose to have themselves immortalised for eternity as they would have been in the middle of a jolly feast. Wine cup in hand and snacks at their elbows, their terracotta avatars recline atop their funerary urns while reminding us of the pleasures of life.  While many nationalities take their culinary traditions seriously, the Italians have a spiritual bond between food, drink, life and love that's been hard-wired into their culture from the beginning.

Oxford's Ashmolean Museum builds its current exhibition, Last Supper in Pompeii, on this simple truth. The result is a joyous romp through a laid-back, pleasure-seeking culture most of us would have been delighted to be a part of ... until one Mount Vesuvius decided to intervene.

Pompeii is familiar territory for many history lovers and always a popular draw. The British Museum's last major exhibition on the subject was just six years ago. (My review here.) But the food angle is an inspired one, bringing the people of Pompeii to life in a very relatable way while also opening the door to display a vast amount of art and artefacts. Pretty much everything in Pompeii seemed to lead back to a good party.

We're welcomed by a life-sized statue of Bacchus on loan from the Archeological Museum in Naples, source of many of the best items here. (This is a potent reminder of just how rich that museum is; both this show and the British Museum's current Troy exhibition are stuffed with loans from there, yet their core collection is so vast I doubt visitors in Naples would notice.) Bacchus holds a wine jug in his hand, grapes and vines weave through his tousled hair and his fit yet louche pose is imbued with a raw sexuality. The message is clear: these people liked a good time.

The early galleries explain the role of celebratory food and drink in Italian culture, then take a look at why Pompeii was such a special place. Anyone who's been on that stretch of the Italian coast knows that it's favoured with clement, sunny weather and generally mild, beautiful seas that yielded enormous catches for little work. The surrounding landscape is green and gentle, and the slopes beneath Vesuvius were almost obscenely fertile. Locals had no idea the reason was volcanic soil. One of the treasures of the show is a wall painting containing the only contemporary depiction of Vesuvius before it blew its top in 79 AD. It was a towering, quiet, wooded mountain. The Italians were familiar with volcanos, but nobody suspected one beneath the familiar peak.

Two impressive galleries at the heart of the exhibition set the story in the garden and dining room, often interchangeable for culinary good times and always at the heart of the ancient Roman household. Though small panels of fresco are on display throughout, here we have whole walls transported in their entirety to set the scene.

Videos on a continuous loop on other walls enhance the illusion. One is a particularly lifelike conjuring of one of Pompeii's most glamorous eating spaces, with dining couches set in a raised, highly-decorated apse through which a narrow water feature ran to join the pool in the garden you would have faced through the meal. Garden dining tables with water flowing through them still show up at Hampton Court or Chelsea most years, suggesting that Pompeiian designers knew what they were about.

The room beyond this is more practical, reflecting the kitchen itself. These were small spaces compared to the lavish dining areas they served, but the preserved foods and spices brought up in excavations and on display here attest to the Romans wide-ranging tastes. The exhibition ends with a section on Britannia, where the objects aren't nearly as elegant but the message is clear. Out here in the hinterlands people were doing their best to copy the fine dining trends in the imperial capital, whether in tableware or cooking styles.

We end with a section on death, marking the abrupt end of Pompeii's party beneath Vesuvius' toxic gas and ash fall. Two of the most haunting treasures wait here, in suitably sombre lighting. The first is a magnificent bronze of the god Apollo, with his ivory and lapis eyes still intact and radiating life. He was probably used to support a tray of drinks or canapés in a wealthy home, but here ... positioned at the end of a corridor of tomb monuments ... he seems to be welcoming you to the afterlife. Just beyond him is the Lady of Oplontis.

Anyone who's visited Pompeii will have seen, and probably been haunted by, the plaster casts of the victims of the disaster. These were made quite simply, by pouring plaster into cavities in the ash left when human (or animal) soft tissue had disintegrated. Finds are still happening but casting methods have moved on. This lady's final resting place was discovered in the late 1970s and she's cast in resin, which captures far more detail, from the treasure she'd wrapped her body around to the painful tension in her face and limbs. One hopes she enjoyed her life, because it was a horrible death.

But as thought provoking as these big pieces are, it's the smaller bits of normal life that will stick with you. The exhibition is stuffed with the kinds of everyday objects that wouldn't be out of place in our own kitchens, dining rooms and gardens. Many are humble, some are ridiculously grand ... almost all would have been objects of desire at their time of manufacture.

The paraphernalia for storing, decanting and serving wine could be a mini-exhibition on its own. There are delicate glass vases and drinking cups and silver vessels with extraordinary details like incised patterns, lions heads and frolicking animals. But the item I'd bring home with me was a silver strainer, used for separating sediment from the wine, punched with ornate patterns of geometric precision.

The cookware was equally fascinating, and surprising in just how familiar much of it seems. There's a barbecue grill you could put into service immediately, and a pan with six cups that looks precisely like the one I keep meaning to buy to produce Danish aebleskiver (apple donuts). The Romans, it's thought, used it to cook eggs or cakes. There are spice storage vessels, colanders, griddles and cooking pots that haven't changed their form in 2,000 years. Not everything is familiar to the modern eye, however. The Romans had a legendary fondness for dormice, which it turns out they raised for household consumption. You can see a purpose-made dormouse pot complete with a spiral of running paths moulded into the terracotta sides. Basically an early habitrail with a tasty snack as the final objective.

It's rare that an exhibition about the ancient world can bridge the centuries and bring people to life. Through a shared love of food and wine, this show does that with the flare of a Michelin starred restaurant. Get there in its final weeks if you can. (The show closes on 12 January.)