Page 54 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

THE EARLY DYNASTIC PERIOD

which fits in the profile with the triangles of nose and lips. But both in front and
side views the intent eyes are the centre of the plastic composition. Whatever the differ­
ences between individual statues, the formal principles arc the same, and their logic is
astonishing. This is a plastic style in which the chaotic reality of visual impressions is
d by the creation of a perfectly homogeneous, self-contained, three-dimensional
mastcre
form, of an abstract order.
Perhaps it should be said that one need not impute any reasoning of this kind to the
ancient sculptors. An analysis of works of art rationalizes and makes explicit what was
intuitively created. But the sculptures we have described present in an extreme form one
of the possible solutions to the problem of all sculptors - how to create a body which
asserts its reality in space. It will do so if its own spatial volume is clearly recognized and
convincingly established. If its three-dimensional character is not properly stressed the
sculpture appears improbable and imperfectly realized. From the fifth century b.c. the
West has rendered the human figure as a living, potentially mobile organism, involved
in a network of relationships, and to be comprehended by the spectator only in a circular
movement that can encompass the whole range of its complex functions.26 In pre-
Greek times it was not organic unity, but abstract, geometric unity that was sought.
The main masses were arranged in approximation to some geometrical form - the cube
or cylinder or cone; and the details were stylized in harmony with the ideal scheme. The
clear three-dimensional character of these geometrical bodies was reflected in the figures
composed under this rule. And it is the dominance of the cylinder and the cone which
imparts unity and corporeality to die Mesopotamian figures: note how the arms, meet­
ing in front of the bodies, and the fringed lower edge of kilts, emphasize the circum­
ference, and thereby the depth as well as the width. This geometric approximation es­
tablishes the figures emphatically in space.
It also explains the spellbound appearance of all pre-Greek sculpture in the round.
Only the choice of the ideal form differs: in Egypt it is the cube or oblong rather than
the cylinder or cone. Once chosen, the formal ideal remains dominant; throughout all
changes of style Egyptian sculpture is squared, Mesopotamian sculpture is rounded. In
Egypt front, sides, and back are joined as brusquely as possible and the limbs do not
overlap from one plane into the other; in Mesopotamia, at all times limbs and clothing
are made to emphasize the rotundity of the stone, hi Egypt the seated figure with its
many right angles - at knees, elbows, and hips - is the favourite and most effective sculp­
tural subject. The Mesopotamian sculptor is apt to botch this pose by either reducing or
exaggerating its crucial element: the horizontal expanse from hip to knee. No one seeing
the front view of the figure in plate io can be certain that it is a seated, not a standing
figure. In another statue, from Khafaje,27 the head is the apex of a cone, of which the
surface descends almost uninterruptedly from the face along the arms held before the
chest to the absurdly protruding knees. Even in plate 28, where the natural proportions
are preserved, the roundness of all edges and the over-all pattern of the fleecy kilt are seen
to obscure the motif if we compare it with the treatment it would receive in Egypt. In
Mesopotamia the standing figure is the most popular as well as the most successful sub­
ject of statuary.

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