A MARBLE "EYE" IDOL TELL BRAK REGION, CIRCA 3500-3300 B.C.

拍品描述

A MARBLE "EYE" IDOL, TELL BRAK REGION, CIRCA 3500-3300 B.C. Of flat, plaque-like form, cut from a dark grey stone with warm ochre encrustation across the surface. The body rises from a broad, straight base to squared shoulders, above which a short neck supports a wide, lobed head dominated by two enormous almond-shaped eyes with drilled pupils, framed by concentric incised rims and joined at the centre by a continuous brow. A second, smaller pair of eyes is carved in relief upon the chest, similarly rimmed and joined, forming what appears to be a subsidiary or "nested" figure held against the body of the larger one. The reverse (not shown) is typically left plain in this class of object. The surface retains earthen deposits within the incisions, and the edges show minor chipping consistent with burial. The doubled iconography is the distinguishing feature of this piece. Eye idols of the Tell Brak type are ordinarily carved with a single pair of eyes on a schematic body; examples bearing a smaller figure on the chest are understood to represent a parent and child, or a deity and worshipper, and are considerably less common than the single-figure form. The reduction of the human figure to the eyes alone, without mouth, nose, ears, or articulated limbs, concentrates the entire identity of the represented being in the act of seeing, or of being seen by, the divinity to whom the object was dedicated. The type is named for the Eye Temple at Tell Brak in northeastern Syria, where hundreds of such figures were recovered from the levels associated with the late Uruk period. They were deposited as votive offerings, packed into the fabric of the temple's altars and foundations, and appear to have functioned as permanent surrogates for the worshipper before the god, the wide eyes standing for the attentive gaze fixed on the deity. The choice of a hard, dark stone, worked by grinding and incision rather than by modelling, produced an image durable enough to serve indefinitely in that role, and the flat plaque form allowed the figures to be stood or set into a matrix in numbers. The convention belongs to the wider late-fourth-millennium horizon in which northern Mesopotamia participated in the Uruk expansion, and the eye idols stand among its most immediately recognisable devotional products. The figure with a subsidiary figure upon its chest occupies a particular place within the corpus. It has been read as a mother with child, and as a votary carrying an image of the deity, but in either reading the smaller pair of eyes duplicates the votive gesture of the larger, so that the object contains within itself both the worshipper and that which is worshipped, or both the offerer and the offering. This idol exemplifies the Tell Brak votive tradition at its most reductive and most articulate, in which the human presence before the god is compressed into a pair of eyes carved in stone, and in which even the addition of a second figure is registered by the same minimal means. The doubled form places it among the less common variants of an already distinctive class. Dimensions: Height: 7.5cm

图片