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

拍品描述

A MARBLE "EYE" IDOL, TELL BRAK REGION, NORTHERN MESOPOTAMIA, CIRCA 3500-3300 B.C. Of flat, trapezoidal form, the wide skirted body tapering to a short columnar neck surmounted by two large, prominent, pierced discoid eyes. Carved from a pale marble now bearing warm ochre and buff surface accretions across the body, with faint reddish deposits gathered at the join between neck and shoulders and along the lower edge. The reverse is left plain. The eyes are drilled through, the encircling rims raised in relief and slightly domed, giving the object its characteristic staring aspect. The whole is worked from a single thin plaque, the edges softly bevelled from long burial. The reduction of the human form to a pair of enlarged eyes above a schematic body is the defining feature of this class of votive. All indication of mouth, nose, arms, and gender is suppressed. What remains is the act of looking, or of being looked upon. The disproportionate eyes are understood as the essential feature of the worshipper before the deity, the organ through which presence is registered and devotion made manifest. Examples of the type range from single-headed figures such as the present piece to double and triple-headed variants, and occasionally to smaller idols carved in relief on the body of a larger one, taken to represent a family group or an offering made on behalf of others. The idols are named for the site at which they were found in vast quantities, the so-called Eye Temple at Tell Brak in the Khabur basin of northeastern Syria, excavated by Max Mallowan in the 1930s. Thousands of examples were recovered from the temple's foundation deposits and surrounding levels, dated to the Late Uruk period, when Tell Brak was among the largest urban centres of the ancient Near East. The material, marble or gypsum alabaster worked to a thin, almost tablet-like section, was chosen for its pale luminosity and its capacity to take a fine polish. Stone of this quality was not local to the alluvial plain and its use signals the votive character of the objects, which appear to have been deposited in bulk within the temple precinct rather than used domestically. The precise identity of the figures remains debated. They are variously interpreted as representations of the worshipper standing in perpetual attendance before the god, as substitutes for the dedicant in prayer, or as images of the deity of the temple itself, whose watching eye guaranteed the covenant between worshipper and shrine. In any reading, the eye is the vehicle of communication with the divine, and the object exists as its own permanent act of gaze. This idol exemplifies the Tell Brak type in its most reduced and characteristic form, the single-headed variant in which the whole vocabulary of the class, the trapezoidal body, the columnar neck, the paired drilled eyes, is realised at the smallest legible scale. It stands among the earliest surviving objects in the Mesopotamian tradition to render human presence through abstraction rather than description, and prefigures by a millennium the votive statuary of the Early Dynastic temples of Sumer. Dimensions: Height: 3.8cm

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