The sub-field that has seen probably the greatest amount of study and research is Neo-Assyrian art, particularly in the area of the carved relief orthostats, or dressed stones, that adorned the walls of the great palaces at Nimrud, Khorsabad, and Nineveh from the ninth through the seventh centuries bce. Groenewegen-Frankfort considers them a ‘‘most striking innovation.. .entirely secular and narrative,’’ and they offer fertile material for her exploration into the depiction of time and space (1951: 170). The notion that Assyrian reliefs presented purely non-religious imagery has recently been disputed by studies of all the reliefs, not just the most commonly published ones, within their architectural setting (Russell 1998). Nonetheless, the historical narrative reliefs, many of which depict detailed representations of battles set in topographically diverse areas, have claimed the greatest attention.
Of particular interest is the apparent linear development of spatial representation from the ninth century down to Assurbanipal, the last important Assyrian king, in the mid-seventh century (Groenewegen-Frankfort 1951: 172-81; Frankfort 1954: 91, 93-9; Parrot 1961a: 42-3; Moortgat 1969: 134, 137, 149, 154, 157; Amiet 1980: 251; Russell 1991: 192-215). The ninth century narratives organize most of the figures on a single ground line so that they stand the full height of a register. An example is the carved orthostats of Assurnasirpal II which are divided into two pictorial registers separated by the so-called Standard Inscription listing his titles and military deeds.
In contrast, a seascape of Sargon II at Khorsabad and almost all of Sennacherib’s reliefs from the Southwest Palace at Nineveh used the entire height of the over two meter tall orthostats as a patterned background for numerous small figures (see Figure 21.10). This change has often been interpreted as deriving from a progressive technical ability to depict perspectivally accurate space. Assurbanipal’s reliefs, however, present a challenge to this developmental account, because they exhibit an inconsistency in using both these as well as other representational modes. It may be highly misleading to evaluate these compositional differences by standards established in Renaissance one-point perspective, an artistic concept that derived from a very different social, political, and religious context. Indeed, the diversity of representational styles used by the Neo-Assyrians for composing figures in space suggests that, rather than striving for a single, all-encompassing illusionistic perspective, they manipulated spatial and perceptual elements in multiple ways to provoke varied meaningful responses. Groenewegen-Frankfort’s understanding of the spatial presence evoked in Assurbanipal’s lion hunts as ‘‘dramatic space’’ and ‘‘significant voids’’ comes close to this idea, although she remains bound to the Euro-centric definition of representational perspective (1951: 181).
Moortgat proposed that the reliefs were created in a program of propaganda for the king. He wrote, ‘‘painting and relief are not merely used to decorate vacant wall surfaces as the servant of architecture: on the contrary, sculpture in the round and two-dimensional art combine to create a new organic form of art, architectural sculpture: even the words and writing in the ornamental bands of cuneiform combine with the relief friezes to glorify the concepts of king and empire in the great pictorial annals’’ (1969: 130 emphasis Moortgat’s). Winter elaborates upon this concept, arguing that both Assurnasirpal II’s ninth-century reliefs and the royal titles carved on every orthostat physically structured a multidimensional definition of Assyrian kingship along the four walls of his Nimrud throne room, which stood as the
Figure 21.10 The siege of Lachish, Southwest Palace, Nineveh. Source: British Museum, WAA, Or. Dr., 1,59. © British Museum
Metaphoric and ideological center of the empire (1981). Further studies of NeoAssyrian historical narratives have enriched the scope of this scholarship (Marcus 1987; Russell 1987). Several recent studies have extended the inquiry to examine the ways in which the relief imagery itself participated in the construction of imperial ideology (Cifarelli 1998; Thomason 2001).
Specific subjects have also been the focus of research, especially the celebrated lion hunts of Assurbanipal (see Figure 21.11). Scholarly treatment of these has ranged from the almost purely formal to the psychological to a religiously oriented approach.
Our modern response to Assurbanipal’s hunts has clearly impacted scholarship. Moortgat wrote, ‘‘... when we look at the king’s contests with lions, we are moved not so much by a sense of the conquest of evil than by pity for the tragic fate of the beasts’’ (Moortgat 1969: 157). Groenewegen-Frankfort said, ‘‘the artist of the hunting scenes. . . showed that he possessed the emotional depth which could convey the tragedy of suffering and defeat, of desperate courage and broken pride. . . an artist who revealed the depth of his fear and pity for these doomed creatures and raised his scenes to the stature of tragedy’’ (Groenewegen-Frankfort 1951: 180-1). It has even been suggested that the artist of such pathos-inducing figures as the so-called Dying Lioness was a captive who identified with the hunted prey and sought to subvert Assyrian imperialism, though this opinion has not received much support (Barnett 1976: 13; Reade 1995: 88). A unique study of the lion hunts by Bersani and Dutoit (1985) makes no attempt to displace our response onto the ancient Assyrians, but rather explores the way in which the formal qualities of their violence tap into our psychological pleasures. Recent studies that draw upon an expanded repertoire of visual and textual sources have sought to situate the reliefs better within the context of Assyrian conceptions and point to the ritual and sacred implications of the imagery in view of scenes that depict the king pouring libations over dead lions and the artificial nature of several of the represented hunts (Weissert 1997; Watanabe 2002). A forthcoming dissertation contends that no one meaning inheres in these reliefs, but rather that the dynamic process of interaction between them and their various audiences produced a spectrum of meanings tied to power relations surrounding the king (Aker forthcoming).
World History
