ANATOLIAN COPPER ALLOY SEATED GODDESS. CIRCA: 2800-2500 B.C.

拍品描述

AN ANATOLIAN COPPER ALLOY FIGURE OF A SEATED GODDESS, ANATOLIA, CIRCA 2800-2500 B.C. Of compact and heavily stylised form, the figure is cast as a squat seated female, the rounded head rising from broad shoulders without an articulated neck. The facial features are reduced to a prominent central nose in low relief, the eyes and mouth barely indicated, the cranium smooth and domed. The arms are held close to the body and folded across the abdomen, the hands meeting at the midline above a heavy lap. The legs are drawn up and folded beneath the body in a seated posture, the mass of the thighs and buttocks forming the wide base on which the figure rests. The surface carries a dense green patina with cuprite-red exposures across the lap and torso, and areas of cupreous encrustation typical of long burial. Mounted on a plain black rectangular base. The seated posture, the frontal symmetry, and the concentration of volume in the lower body identify the figure within the wider tradition of Early Bronze Age Anatolian female images associated with fertility and generative power. The reduction of the face to a single vertical ridge for the nose, with the other features suppressed, is characteristic of the abstracting tendency of the Anatolian plateau in this period, in which the body is treated as a schematic sign rather than a portrait. The emphasis placed on the folded arms across the belly and the broadened hips and thighs draws the reading toward maternity and the female generative principle, a subject repeatedly rendered in the small-scale sculpture of central and western Anatolia during the third millennium B.C. Copper and its alloys carried particular weight in Early Bronze Age Anatolia. The plateau lay across some of the richest metal-bearing zones of the ancient Near East, and the mastery of copper metallurgy at sites such as Alaca Höyük, Horoztepe and Hasanoğlan underpinned the emergence of a distinctive material culture in which cast-metal images, ceremonial standards and prestige weapons circulated among elite and cultic contexts. A cast female figure of this scale would have belonged to that same sphere of specialised metal production, and its survival in the ground has left the characteristic mineralised green and red surface seen here. This figure exemplifies the abstracted Anatolian idiom of the third millennium B.C., in which the female body is compressed into a compact seated volume and the identity of the deity is carried by posture and proportion rather than by facial description. It belongs to the small corpus of cast copper-alloy images that translate the more familiar stone and terracotta idols of the plateau into the more prestigious medium of metal. Dimensions: Height: 5cm. Height on stand: 6.2cm.

图片