So this is what it must have felt like to discover Tutankhamun’s tomb
Treasures of the Al Thani Collection Hôtel de la Marine, Paris
★★★★★
If you’ve ever wondered what a 212-carat emerald looks like (whopping), or how the ancient Egyptian queen Hatshepsut played board games at court (with a panthershaped piece of jasper), or what kind of robe you’d have worn if you were very rich in 11th-century central Asia (fur-trimmed silk, woven with the words “glory, prosperity, victory”), then I have just the museum for you.
This month, the Al Thani art collection – created by Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al Thani of Qatar, and one of the most noteworthy in private hands – takes up long-term residence in Paris, in a grand and impeccably pedigreed 1770s palace on the Place de la Concorde that has recently undergone a £111million restoration.
Built for Louis XV, the Gardemeuble de la Couronne once housed the crown’s tapestries, furniture, gold and silver ornaments and jewels. Until 1792, that is, when sans-culottes broke in and pilfered the lot. The following year, they watched Marie Antoinette’s execution from its loggia, after which the Admiralty moved in. Their 200-year occupation gave the building its current name, the Hôtel de la Marine, though it spoilt much of the original decor.
The Al Thani collection holds about 6,000 objects, only a handful of which have ever been on public display. For this first exhibition, 120 works of art have been installed – not in the richly embellished, Louis XVI glory of the palace reception rooms, but in a space much sleeker and more avant garde in tone, and which I imagine might compare to Howard Carter’s torchlit experience, on entering Tutankhamun’s tomb.
It’s dark, for one, with deep black walls, and a grey-black stone floor whose pattern echoes the parquet of Versailles. Designed by the Paris-based Japanese architect Tsuyoshi Tane, the space is meant to be transportative, “an almost fairy-tale experience,” he says, and that tone is set in the first room, where thousands of acanthus-like gold ornaments are strung from the ceiling, shivering every so often in the cool air.
Beneath are seven objects that show high points of creative endeavour in the collection’s 5,000-year time span. A round-hipped marble figure from Asia Minor, for instance, known as the Stargazer and dating from around 3,000 BC, demonstrates wryly that abstraction is nothing new, though it’s equally pleasurable to relish the intricacies of a 4,000-year-old stag-shaped Anatolian drinking cup.
The second room contemplates how in every era and every civilisation, humans have been driven to record themselves, and it’s worth the ticket price alone. Eleven heads, each in their own glass cylinder, are presented at a height that insists we look into their eyes. The centrepiece is a bust of Hadrian with a chalcedony head, carved during the Roman emperor’s reign (117 to 138), though its gilt torso is Venetian renaissance. Look out, too, for the Gabon reliquary head once owned by Joseph Brummer, whose African antiquities inspired Modigliani et al in early 1900s Montparnasse.
The largest room concerns the Islamic lands, and aesthetic exchanges with Europe and Asia. There are Turkish daggers, Iranian astrolabes and the above-noted Mughal emerald, though even that pales next to a ruby encrusted rosewater sprinkler. The final space, designed by Tane to evoke an ancient treasury, contains the oldest piece in the exhibition: a pendant dating to 4,000 BC that is so elegantly made I would have believed you if you had told me it was made last week.
An entire blockbuster show could be built around most of the objects here. It doesn’t matter which order you visit them, either, since each room is complete and satisfying in itself, and the impression overall less of being taught than being free to find in it what you will. Many visitors have spoken of the collection’s “soul” and “warmth”, which feels right – a history not of cold facts, but of emotions and stories.