A MASTERPIECE

The Masterpieces exhibition (open until February 24) at the University of East Anglia's Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, is one of the most fascinating I have seen for a long time. Simply for its scope, and the number of exhibits, it warrants the best part of a day's visit, and while arguments may rumble on about what ought to be there and is not, or what is there and is somehow not deserving, the basic premise has surely been achieved.
And the premise? A gathering of works from across the face of the arts (from treasure hoards of antiquity to album covers, Norwich shawls and the collections of grand houses) showing, and here I quote from the catalogue, 'East Anglia at its most complex, its most far-reaching, and at its most beautiful.'
You submerge yourself in detail and variety. Whether it is a Lotus Formula One racing car, a collection of photographs, chairs from Suffolk, paintings or jewellery, architecture or stained glass, it leads one on a relentlessly fascinating journey. It also reinforces and illustrates our strong historic links with France and the Low Countries, the Rhine delta and Scandinavia, and thus our previously physical and latterly emotional attachment to mainland Europe, and begs the question: are we really as isolated and independent as some folk like to think?
Personal favourites abound. The battered copper alloy head of Claudius (or possibly Nero) fished out of the river Alde at Rendham (Suffolk); the Crownthorpe hoard; the Hoxne pepper pot; the Pentney Anglo-Saxon disc brooch; John Sell Cotman's painting Storm on a Yarmouth Beach; Philip Wilson Steer's Children Paddling; and Epstein's bronze head of Albert Einstein. They are all there. But if I had to choose just one item from amid the dozens to put into my my personal display case, Then it would have to be the Happisburgh handaxe.
It is large to begin with, and would have needed a strong hand to use, and the edges still look as sharp as razors. Not the first handaxe to be found, of course, but the first found in some sort of dating context, which in this case was the fossil rich deposit of the Cromer Forest Bed. And the dating? Well, 700,000 years anyway, and possibly 900,000 years, which makes it contemporary with the fossilised West Runton elephant skeleton and also one of the oldest human artefacts ever found in Britain.
Scouring tides at Happisburgh over the years have slowly creamed away layers of the beach and cliffs down to the ancient surface of Doggerland, the submerged landscape which once connected us to the mainland. So the handaxe tells of human arrivals in our neck of the woods either just before the last Ice Age or during one of the Ice Age's warmer spells. These wanderers, who may or may not have been Homo Heidelbergensis, evidently crossed Doggerland using routes between the rivers, bringing their technology with them, in order to follow the herds and explore our outermost corner of the Continent.
The Happisburgh handaxe is a marvellous connection with our remote past, and with our beginnings, and had it not been for this tool then it is likely that some of the other masterpieces on display would not have been created.
The flint handaxe. Man's greatest invention? Ever?