Pod Academy

Take a look at The Tribuna of the Uffizi by Johan Zoffany. What do you see? A group of Georgian Grand Tourist poseurs.  But one figure, towers above the rest, stands apart, on the far right of the painting. It is James Bruce of Kinneard, the real Indiana Jones. James Bruce is introduced in this blog, and in the accompanying short podcast  by our producer, Antonia Dalivalle.  Antonia explores the story of Bruce's travels in Abyssinia/Ethiopia in her  longer podcast The Real Indiana Jones - coming soon.  In the left-hand corner of the painting, a jumble of valuable artefacts - including a distressed looking lion sculpture – are strewn across the floor. The connoisseurs are crowded into a chapel-like space, the Tribuna in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. This was a ‘Holy of Holies’ – a ‘Hollywood Walk of Fame’ – of treasured European antiquities and artworks. They were on an eighteenth-century equivalent of the ‘Gap Year’. They weren’t finding themselves – but rather, the roots of European culture, through art, lit