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

拍品描述

A MARBLE DOUBLE "EYE" IDOL, TELL BRAK REGION, CIRCA 3500-3300 B.C. Of flat, tapering body rising from a wide base to a narrower shoulder, surmounted by two large pierced disc-form eyes joined at the centre and rendered in heavy relief above the brow line. The body is plain and undecorated, its surface bearing extensive earthen encrustation and patches of buff and ochre deposit consistent with long burial, the marble showing a pale cream tonality where the original surface is exposed. The eyes are worked as raised concentric rings around deep circular perforations, the rims rounded and the inner walls cleanly cut. No facial features beyond the eyes are indicated, and the body terminates flat at the base. The reduction of the human figure to a featureless trapezoidal body and a pair of disproportionately enlarged eyes is the defining convention of the type. The doubling of the eyes on a single body, rather than the more common single pair, places this example within a recognised subgroup of the Tell Brak corpus in which two figures appear to be conjoined, sometimes interpreted as a pair, sometimes as a parent and child where a smaller secondary figure rises from the shoulder of the first. Here the two eye-pairs are of equivalent scale and set side by side, suggesting a paired reading. The radical emphasis on the gaze, at the expense of mouth, nose, and limbs, has been understood as a votive concentration on the act of seeing or being seen by the divine, the figures functioning as perpetual witnesses deposited within a sanctuary. Several thousand such idols were recovered from the so-called Eye Temple at Tell Brak in the upper Khabur basin of northeastern Syria, where they had been deposited as votive offerings in the levels associated with the late Uruk horizon of the late fourth millennium B.C. The choice of marble, worked by abrasion and drilling rather than carving in the round, gave the figures a pale, luminous quality distinct from the fired clay and bone examples of the same deposit, and marble examples are generally taken to represent a higher tier of votive commission within the assemblage. The type is among the earliest sustained traditions of stone figural sculpture from Mesopotamia and stands at the threshold of the urban and temple cultures that would crystallise in the following Early Dynastic period further south. This idol exemplifies the Tell Brak votive tradition at its most reductive and most insistent, where the human presence is collapsed into the apparatus of vision and offered, in pairs, to the sanctuary. The doubled form places it within a smaller and more iconographically charged subset of the corpus, in which the votive act is understood as collective rather than individual. Height: 10.5cm

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