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-form, carved from a pale marble now toned to warm ochre and pinkish tan through burial. The body rises as a rectangular slab with squared shoulders, narrowing to a short columnar neck that supports a broad, spreading head. The head is dominated by two large drilled eyes set beneath heavy ridged brows that sweep outward in continuous arcs, meeting at the centre in a shallow vertical junction. Above the head rises a small stepped projection, tapering and ringed with incised bands. The reverse and body are left plain. The surface preserves earth deposits, minor chips along the edges, and pitting consistent with prolonged burial. The reduction of the human form to a broad-browed, staring visage set upon an undifferentiated body is the defining feature of the type. The eyes are the entire subject of the object. Everything else, the shoulders, the trunk, the base, functions as a support for the gaze. In the votive economy of the Late Chalcolithic Upper Mesopotamian world, the eye was understood as the site of contact between the worshipper and the deity, the organ through which attention and supplication were directed. To leave an image of the eyes in the sanctuary was to leave one's regard permanently fixed upon the god. The small ringed projection above the head, seen on a number of related examples, is generally read as a schematic rendering of hair drawn up or a headdress, though its precise reading is unresolved. Idols of this class were recovered in very large numbers from the so-called Eye Temple at Tell Brak in the Khabur basin of northeastern Syria, excavated by Max Mallowan in the 1930s. They were deposited in and around the temple's altars, evidently as votive offerings, and represent one of the largest concentrations of ex-voto sculpture known from the fourth millennium B.C. The type occurs in alabaster, gypsum, and marble, in a range of scales from a few centimetres to over ten, and with variations that include single figures, paired figures, figures carrying smaller figures, and examples with multiple sets of eyes. Marble examples such as the present piece are less common than the softer gypsum variants and would have required a greater investment of labour to shape and drill. The choice of marble for a votive object of this scale is not incidental. Where gypsum could be worked rapidly with simple tools, marble demanded abrasion and drilling with harder materials, and its pale, cool surface would have carried a different visual weight within the temple's interior. The material signals a donor of some standing, or at least a willingness to commission a more durable substitute for the more common stone. This figure exemplifies the Tell Brak eye idol in its most reduced and iconic form, in which the entire sculptural argument is concentrated in the paired drilled eyes and their surmounting brow. It stands within the earliest coherent tradition of votive image-making in the ancient Near East, prefiguring by several centuries the standing worshipper figures of the Early Dynastic temples further south. Dimensions: Height: 8.7cm

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