AN EXCEPTIONAL LURISTAN BRONZE ‘MASTER OF ANIMALS’ STANDARD, IRAN, CIRCA 1000-650 BC

拍品描述

A LURISTAN BRONZE 'MASTER OF ANIMALS' STANDARD, WESTERN IRAN, CIRCA 1000-650 B.C. Of tall columnar form, rising from a base composed of two large quadrupeds, likely ibexes or stags, standing symmetrically on either side of a central vertical shaft, their necks arched and heads turned inward. The shaft ascends through successive tiers of openwork zoomorphic and anthropomorphic ornament, resolving at the summit in a rectangular cup-like element supported by outward-facing animal protomes and small crouching figures. Between the base animals and the crowning element, further pairs of confronted beasts and abbreviated figures are ranged along the shaft in registers, their bodies flattened against the central axis and their heads projecting laterally. The surface carries a green cuprous patina with earthen encrustation across the lower legs of the flanking animals and the recessed interstices of the upper openwork. The iconography belongs to the group conventionally designated the "Master of Animals" standards, in which a central frontal figure, human or hybrid, grasps or is flanked by paired beasts rising symmetrically on either side. On the present example the uppermost register presents the canonical schema, with a small frontal figure enclosed between two rearing animals whose bodies form the outer edge of the composition. The type derives from a much older Near Eastern visual formula, current from the third millennium onward in Mesopotamia and Elam, in which mastery over wild fauna signals the authority of a deity or heroised figure over the natural and chthonic realms. In the Luristan repertoire, this schema is repeated and elaborated across multiple tiers, producing an object that is both hieratic image and structural column. The precise function of the Luristan standards remains debated. They are consistently recovered without secure archaeological context, their find-spots concentrated in the graves and sanctuary deposits of the Zagros highlands, and their pierced or socketed lower shafts indicate that they were mounted, probably in a vase-shaped support of the type also produced in bronze. A ritual or votive role is generally accepted, whether as cult objects fixed within a sanctuary or as funerary furniture. The medium itself, tin-bronze produced by the lost-wax method at a technical level unusual in its period and region, marks the standards as prestige commissions. The metallurgy of Luristan drew on ore sources within the Zagros and depended on itinerant or workshop-based specialists whose products circulated across the highland pastoral communities and into neighbouring lowland polities. The upright axial composition, with its stacked registers of paired animals converging on a central figure, distinguishes the finials of this class from the horse-bits, pins, and disc-headed pins that constitute the wider Luristan bronze corpus. The animal repertoire, principally caprids, felines, and hybrid creatures, is drawn from the same visual vocabulary but here organised into a vertical hierarchy that reads as a cosmological diagram, the wild fauna subordinated at successive levels to the central presence at the summit. This standard exemplifies the developed phase of Luristan bronze production, in which the Master of Animals schema is extended from a single register into a fully articulated vertical composition. The multiplication of paired beasts along the shaft, and the retention of the canonical frontal figure at the summit, place it within the mature tradition of Iron Age Zagros metalwork, where ritual bronze reached its most ambitious sculptural expression before the type disappears from the archaeological record in the seventh century B.C. Dimensions: Height: 64cm

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