The Gift of a Sasanian Stucco Relief Author(s): M. S.

Dimand Reviewed work(s): Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 10 (Oct., 1940), pp. 191-192 Published by: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3256763 . Accessed: 14/01/2012 04:47
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BULLETIN

OF THE METROPOLITAN

MUSEUM

OF ART

century America was probably the most versatile carriage-making country in the world. While homely vehicles of American origin bowled along the roads from coast to coast, the most fashionable European type carriages, coupes, victorias, sporting dogcarts, and road coaches were built to individual order by firms like Brewster and Company in New York. The vivid colored

THE GIFT OF A SASANIAN STUCCO RELIEF

The Museum's collection of Iranian art
of the Sasanian period (A.D. 226-642) has

been enriched by a fine stucco relief, a recent gift from H. Kevorkian.1This relief is a welcome addition to the representative group of stucco panels excavated by the

SASANIAN STUCCO RELIEF VI OR EARLY VII CENTURY

designs and books of working drawings for Brewster carriages, covering the period from 1850 to I905, were given to the Museum some years ago by William Brewster. Just when the evolution of carriage travel seemed to have reached an agreeably satisfactory stage, machinery diverted it into new developments. The railroads took over not only the names, "coach," "cab," "fare," from horse-drawn vehicles, but even their shapes, while the first automobiles were modeled on current carriage designs, and utilized all the science in construction that the coachmakers had learned from centuries of experiment.
ALICE NEWLIN. 101

Museum at Ctesiphon,2 near Baghdad, the capital of the Sasanian empire. Such panels were frequently combined in repeat patterns on the walls of private houses and palaces, as we know from finds in Ctesiphon and Kish in Mesopotamia. Very few stucco reliefs with complete figure subjects are known today. The new relief comes from an unknown site in Iran proper. It represents a royal horseman, probably a king or a prince, in his war regalia, shooting with bow and arrow. Following old oriental conventions his 1Acc.no. 40.58. H. 162 in., w. 182 in. Shown this monthin the Roomof RecentAccessions. 2 Onexhibition in GalleryH 8.

BULLETIN OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART head and legs are shown in profile, while the upper part of his body is in front view. On the well-known Sasanian silver dishes, one of which is in this Museum,3 the king is represented as a supreme hunter, but on our relief he is shown as the supreme warrior. He wears scale armor, an ornate helmet over his crenelated crown, and a mantle with fluttering ends. From his belt hangs a quiver with fluted decoration, and on his chest there is a pectoral with a double pendant. We also see the two wide ribbons so frequently encountered in Sasanian art, which are the attributes of gods and kings. The trappings of the horse consist of pearl bands and twisted leather strips ending in large bell-shaped tassels. The panel is in high relief, originally enhanced with polychromy, and has all the characteristic features of Sasanian sculpture. In style, especially in the skill with which the galloping horse and the vigorous action are rendered, it recalls the royal hunting scenes on Sasanian silver dishes, which range in date from the fourth to the seventh century. The arrangement of the ribbons, the horse trappings, and other details recall particularly the silver dish in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris representing King Khusrau II (590-628). We may assign our relief to the period of this ruler, that is, to the sixth or early seventh that had come to them in the preceding century from Italian sources, set up new standards that were quintessentially French. This break with the dominant tradition of the past, which thus helped to establish "l'Empire de Flore" in France and the primacy of France in European silk weaving, was perhaps the most significant single advance in textiles since the close of the Middle Ages. Consequently, when considered as illustrating phases of this development, the several fabrics exhibited this month in the Room of Recent Accessions take on an additional interest. Some of them show the conditions before the revolt; others reveal the results of revolution. A remarkable English velvet of the beginning of the eighteenth century is an example of the earlier type (fig. i).2 It was woven at Spitalfields, a district in London where a number of French Huguenot weavers had found asylum and work after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. It comes from Boston House in Middlesex County near London, where in the time of Queen Anne it probably formed part of the hangings for a bed. A royal bed of the same era in Hampton Court Palace still possesses its original velvet draperies, which are almost identical in design and color with our new fabric. The two velvets might well have been made by the same manuM. S. DIMAND. facturer. century. Our immediate interest in this piece, however, lies not so much in its history as in its design and the way it was woven. The THE EMPIRE OF FLORA pattern is a concoction of fanciful archiIn 1765 a Lyonese textile designer named tectural motives inspired by Genoese velJoubert de L'Hiberderie charmingly de- vets but conforming to the rather ponderscribed one aspect of art in the Louis XV ous English taste of the period. The weaving period as "l'Empire de Flore."' His words is most expertly done. Two colors of the applied most aptly to the state of affairs in velvet pile, claret red and tawny yellow, his own craft, for almost every silk fabric appear against a creamy satin ground. As was then consecrated to the natural beauties was often the case, even with velvets of of flowers. This vivacious but well-disci- much earlier periods, some of the pile was plined floral style was new in textiles, having cut, the remainder left uncut, thus creating been established only a few decades before. two shades of each color, both the red and It had arrived with revolutionary impact the yellow. Following the traditional methwhen the producers of Lyonese silks, at ods, no attempt was made to get even a length discarding the conceptions of design semblance of modeling into the design, which conveys the usual flat, two-dimen3 On exhibition in Gallery H 8. 2 Acc. no. 1 Le Dessinateur pour lesfabriques d'etoffesd'or, 40.70. Rogers Fund. Cisele voided satin velvet. L. 84 in., w. 21 in. d'argent, et de soie (Paris, 1765), p. 91.
I 2