The Consulate General of Greece in Sydney and the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens (AAIA) at the University of Sydney will host an online lecture by Dr Monica Jackson on Thursday, February 2 at 6pm.
The lecture is titled, Aspects of Beauty: Hellenistic Gold Jewellery in the Benaki Museum Collections, and will reflect on Dr Jackson’s research in the Benaki Museum, culminating in a book published in 2017.
The lecture will focus on the Benaki Museum’s history – starting in the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria, Egypt during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where the collecting instincts of Antonis Benakis (1873-1954), the founder of the Benaki Museum, were shaped.
Dr Jackson will then show how 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.
If you would like to attend this online event please register here.
Who is Dr Monica Jackson?
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, containing 130 beautiful photographs which accompany Dr Jackson’s analysis.
The book is a complete presentation of the entire Hellenistic jewellery of the Benaki Museum. Jewellery is tested both in typology and in complex construction techniques. In a separate chapter, the historical context in which the goldsmith of the period grew is looked at.
Dr Jackson will not only talk of pieces from the collection at this talk but also give an insight into the Benaki family itself.
