Day 153 - Gold cup with gazelles
May 14, 2019
Gallery 404 contains objects from many areas and empires- Iran, Mesopotamia and Babylon, Anatolia, Assyria, and Thrace. They date from the second millennium B.C.E. all the way up to the conquest of the Persians by Alexander the Great.
In perusing the labels, I come across three new vocabulary words: "carinated" (a pottery style in which a vessel with an inward-sloping form rests on a rounded base); "steatopygy" (a noun describing a human form- typically female, I suppose- with very heavy and curvaceous buttocks); and "atropaic" (having the power to ward off evil). I have my cell phone with me and look all these terms up. But I wonder if the average viewer, with less leisure than I, wouldn't be a bit annoyed by seeing these high-falutin' terms for concepts that could be expressed clearly enough in plain English. At least the caption-makers could incorporate the definitions in parentheticals if they are determined to use these terms.
Today's object is a magnificent gold cup from the cemetery site of Marlik in northwestern Iran near the Caspian Sea and dating to the early 1st millennium B.C.E. Only about 4 inches in diameter and 3 inches high, it's decorated with a frieze of four gazelles. What makes it very special is the way in which the animals' heads stand away from the cup; the caption explains that the heads were made from separate pieces of gold and then worked onto the animals' shoulders. The bodies instead are pressed from the inside; the four bodies appear identical, as though the same mold had been pressed four times into the soft gold. I'm struck by the extraordinary delicacy of the animals' modeling, from the powerful musculature of their shoulders to the fine striations on their horns to the tiny lines that indicate the hairs of their pelts. Fine vegetal friezes encircle the cup just below its rim and at its base. If I owned this cup, I would not be able to stop looking at it.
In perusing the labels, I come across three new vocabulary words: "carinated" (a pottery style in which a vessel with an inward-sloping form rests on a rounded base); "steatopygy" (a noun describing a human form- typically female, I suppose- with very heavy and curvaceous buttocks); and "atropaic" (having the power to ward off evil). I have my cell phone with me and look all these terms up. But I wonder if the average viewer, with less leisure than I, wouldn't be a bit annoyed by seeing these high-falutin' terms for concepts that could be expressed clearly enough in plain English. At least the caption-makers could incorporate the definitions in parentheticals if they are determined to use these terms.
Today's object is a magnificent gold cup from the cemetery site of Marlik in northwestern Iran near the Caspian Sea and dating to the early 1st millennium B.C.E. Only about 4 inches in diameter and 3 inches high, it's decorated with a frieze of four gazelles. What makes it very special is the way in which the animals' heads stand away from the cup; the caption explains that the heads were made from separate pieces of gold and then worked onto the animals' shoulders. The bodies instead are pressed from the inside; the four bodies appear identical, as though the same mold had been pressed four times into the soft gold. I'm struck by the extraordinary delicacy of the animals' modeling, from the powerful musculature of their shoulders to the fine striations on their horns to the tiny lines that indicate the hairs of their pelts. Fine vegetal friezes encircle the cup just below its rim and at its base. If I owned this cup, I would not be able to stop looking at it.
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