One Hour At The Fitzwilliam

MUSEUM GUIDE | CABANA TRAVEL | WORLD OF CABANA 

In this series, we travel the world's great museums through the eyes of Cabana Curators, asking one question: if you had only an hour to spare, what would you see? This week, Luke Syson, Director of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, takes Cabana on a journey through time. From a Paleolithic reindeer carved on a stone pebble to a haunting Titian masterpiece, Luke reflects on how this ‘temple and haven’ of British culture embraces history and modernity.

INTERVIEW BY EMMA BECQUE | CABANA TRAVEL | MAY 2025

Interior views reveal the building’s architectural grandeur inside The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge © Lewis Ronald.

The Fitzwilliam Museum is situated on Trumpington Street in Cambridge, behind a neoclassical facade designed by George Basevi and completed by Charles Robert Cockerell in 1848. Its origins lie in a bequest made in 1816 by Richard Fitzwilliam, 7th Viscount of Merrion, who left his collection of paintings, manuscripts and musical scores to the University, along with funds for a purpose-built museum.

Since then, the building has more than doubled in size. Its galleries now hold over half a million objects, from Egyptian coffins to Renaissance maiolica, Persian ceramics, and Chinese jade. The painting collection includes works by Titian, Veronese, Rubens, Van Dyck, Constable, Turner, Degas, Cézanne, and Picasso. 

Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge © David Valinsky.

Luke Syson joined as Director in 2019. He had previously held senior curatorial roles at the British Museum, the V&A, the National Gallery, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Trained in Renaissance and Baroque art, his approach is broad and object-focused. He moves easily between coins, sculptures, paintings, and furniture, and is interested in how historical and contemporary works can coexist in a museum context.

Under his direction, Fitzwilliam’s layered collections continue to be reinterpreted and reimagined. Read on as Luke shares six of his favorite objects and spaces, explaining in his own words why each is so special within the museum.

Unknown maker, Reindeer carving, 12th century BCE

Unknown maker, Reindeer carving, 12th century BCE, Laugerie Basse, France, limestone © Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.

We begin at the bottom of the stairs, in a quiet corner of the museum, with what Luke Syson describes as, “the oldest work of art in the museum - this wonderful Palaeolithic stone on which someone has inscribed a reindeer reaching across its back and scratching its haunches". It dates back to the 12th century BCE and was discovered in the mouth of a cave in Laugerie Basse, France. 

“This particular piece just says something profound and wonderful about a connection between human beings and nature,” Luke explains. “But also the impulse to make things which are genuinely recognisable, even then, as works of art.” Broken in two, the object may have been used in ritual. "However, the piece is more than a record of survival, it carries a spiritual connection between human beings, between each other, but also between us and the world that we live in.”

Forepart of a bronze Lion, unknown maker, Lintel, c. 1st century BCE

Unknown maker, Lintel, c. 1st century BCE, Hadramawt, South Arabia. copper alloy © Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.

Among the museum’s ancient collections, including the sarcophagus lid of Ramesses III and the coffin set of Nespoa Sefet, Luke chooses an object many might overlook.

“One of my favorite items is this bronze lion’s head from Yemen, which is particularly unusual. Dated between 800 and 600 BCE, the piece was discovered on the sandy floor of a house in the southernmost part of Yemen, a region once a key crossroads in the trade of frankincense and myrrh, connecting Asia, Africa, and Europe. It’s part of a material culture for a civilisation we don’t know much about.”

The lion’s head, thought to have once flanked a monumental gateway, entered the Fitzwilliam via Lieutenant Colonel M. T. Boscawen, a Cambridge graduate who received it as a gift from Sultan Ali bin Salah al-Qa’iti. “It began an obsession with bronze collecting that he had, mostly for Renaissance bronzes, which is an essential part of our collection.” Luke reflects on the piece with admiration and a note of caution. “It’s a remarkable and surprising piece worth looking at and thinking about power and its loss, including how vulnerable great civilisations can be if we do not take care of them.” 

Korean Ceramics Collection 

Unknown maker, Basin, 12th century, Korea, stoneware and celadon glaze © Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.

Luke turns next to a room filled with celadon-glazed vessels from 12th-century Korea. “I believe we have one of the most exciting and comprehensive ceramic collections in the UK,” he says. “From ancient Cyprus through to pieces made by Magdalena Dundo or Jennifer Lee.” Among the collection's strengths are English pottery, early Islamic ceramics from Gurgan, and a Korean collection that, as Syson notes, “appears to be the greatest collection of this kind outside Asia.”

The celadon ware is comprised of a collection of meditated green vessels, crafted and made for ritualistic settings. What draws Luke to this collection is the form's restraint and spontaneity. “Their simplicity of form and the subtlety of the colors in these green, blue, grey glazes,” he says, “but also the embrace of accidental splendour when ceramics enter the kiln. Some of the pieces bear the marks of kintsugi repair."

Titian, Tarquin and Lucretia, c.1571

Tiziano Vecellio (Titian), Tarquin and Lucretia, c.1571, oil on canvas © Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.

One of the Fitzwilliam's most celebrated masterpieces is Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia. “It’s rare for a museum of our size to have two works by Titian,” Luke notes. The first, Venus and the Lute Player, comes from Fitzwilliam’s original collection. The second, acquired a century later, was the last painting Titian completed for Philip II of Spain. “With interestingly many of the same ingredients,” Syson explains, “a nude woman, a clothed man, their attributes, the string of pearls or the dagger, are consistent. They are both in a bedchamber setting.”

But here, the mood is radically different. “He turns this pastoral romantic image filled with music and the sense of poetry into a historical violent event, where the pain of Lucretia as a victim of rape, of male violence, is palpable and potent.”

Titian signs the painting on the slipper discarded by Lucretia in the bottom corner. The subject, drawn from Roman history, marks the moment of collapse for a royal dynasty. “Anyone looking at it when it was initially created would have known that this event was followed by her suicide, by the showing of her body in the forum in Rome, by the overthrow of Tarquin’s royal father. The work combines an expressive quality in the way it's painted with this subject matter, which must have acted to the King of Spain as a dreadful warning about what the abuse of power looked like.”

"It’s excruciating to look at over some time,” Syson says, “but simultaneously, it’s a reminder that great works of art deal with enormous themes. We need to look at them carefully and not confuse a piece of poetic erotica with a depiction of pain and violence. Titian was perfectly capable of making the distinction, and so should we be.”

Pierre Auguste Renoir, The Gust of Wind, c.1872

Pierre Auguste Renoir, The Gust of Wind, c.1872, oil on canvas © Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.

"Renoir’s The Gust of Wind is a personal highlight of mine,” Luke says. “I must admit, I needed to be converted to Renoir, but that changed with this piece. He is one of the great bold colorists in art history, and he's an artist who genuinely gives you that extraordinary sensuous quality of being there, planted within that landscape.”

"There’s a vitality in the brushwork, a physicality in the palette, where colour is extraordinarily vivid, where the whole landscape exudes a positive aura. And I always look at this piece and feel energised. It is a truly remarkable painting.”

Bridget Riley's Banner I, 1668, next to  Domenica

Banner I, by Bridget Riley. Acrylic emulsion on canvas, 1968. © Bridget Riley 2025. All rights reserved. Photo © The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.

Luke's final highlight is not a single object but a pairing that signals a shift in the museum’s approach. In the early Italian gallery, long home to Simone Martini, Fra Filippo Lippi and Domenico Veneziano, the team has introduced modern works to create what he describes as “a balancing act between realism and abstraction.”

At the centre of this rehang is a striking juxtaposition: Bridget Riley’s Banner One (1968) alongside Domenico Veneziano’s Annunciation, hung against the original 1920s gold paper with its timeworn patina. “These two pieces show that somebody regarded as one of the great pioneers of mathematical perspective has as much to do with Bridget Riley and her amazing sense of how Optical Art can literally move the eye and persuade the voyeur that things are shifting and moving in front of you. There’s something around the verticals of the columns in Domenico Veneziano’s panel and Bridget Riley’s vertical stripes that looks striking next to each other.” 

This pairing, Syson says, exemplifies the beginnings of the new Fitzwilliam Museum, one that honors the historic while inviting in the contemporary, creating a synergy through dialogue and contrast. "We are giving new life to the spaces through contrasts, new rehangs, artists coming in, and listening to our audiences."