Pesquisando por: "Lion-faced man" - Fotoarena - Agência de fotojornalismo

alb3658980 Relief panel. Culture: Assyrian. Dimensions: 92 1/4 x 92 x 4 1/2 in. (234.3 x 233.7 x 11.4 cm). Date: ca. 883-859 B.C..This relief, from the palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (r. ca. 883-859 B.C.), depicts a king, probably Ashurnasirpal himself, and an attendant. The two larger-than-life-sized figures are carved in low relief, and as with other reliefs in the palace featuring the image of the king, the carving is particularly fine and shows special attention to detail. The panel joins a second relief that shows a further attendant, also facing the king, and a winged supernatural protective figure. Together, the two panels show the king flanked by his human courtiers, just as in other scenes he or the Assyrian Sacred Tree are flanked by human and eagle-headed winged guardian figures.The king is immediately identifiable by his crown, a distinctive truncated cone with a smaller cone emerging from the center, with a long 'streamer' hanging from its back. He is also recognizable by his luxuriant beard, and in the relief's original state would have been further distinguished by his clothing, more elaborately embroidered than that of any other figure. The pigment that originally colored these reliefs is now lost, but the embroidery is still faintly visible in the form of fine inscised lines made by the sculptors over most areas of the king's clothing. The king wears elaborate jewelry, including rosette bracelets, thick armlets worn above the elbow, large pendant earrings, and a necklace whose beads and spacers would probably have consisted of semiprecious stones and gold. The king carries a sword on his left hip, as well as two daggers tucked into his clothing, and in his left hand holds the tip of a bow. In his right hand, balanced on his fingertips, is a shallow bowl. In other reliefs the bowl contains wine and is used for pouring libations, for example on the bodies of slain animals following a royal hunt. Here, however, there is no apparent object for the libation. The relief comes from an area of the palace that seems to have held sarcophagi and might have been devoted to the cult of royal ancestors, and one possibility is that the libation is here being poured for the dead. For similar reasons, while it is normally thought that all such images of the king represent Ashurnasirpal, it has also been suggested that some may represent ancestral kings. The second figure on the relief is beardless, and probably represents a eunuch. He is richly dressed, with jewelry including rosette bracelets, armbands, a collar of beads, probably of semiprecious stone with gold spacers, pendant earrings, and a crescent-shaped pectoral. At the ends of his short sleeves are bands of incised plant motifs representing embroidery; another incised band below the waist shows further plants but also birds, possibly ostriches. He carries a sword whose scabbard, like the king's, ends in the image of two roaring lions. At the sword's hilt another lion head can be seen; an object in the Metropolitan Museum's collection may be just such a hilt . In his right hand the eunuch holds a fly-whisk whose handle is carved in the shape of a ram's head. The object in his left hand may be an oil lamp, though it has also been suggested that it might be a ladle to replenish the wine in the bowl held by the king. Its handle terminates in the head of a snake, or more likely a fantastic composite creature, called Mushhushshu, associated with the god Ashur. A distinctive feature of the Northwest Palace is the so-called Standard Inscription that ran across the middle of every relief, often cutting across the imagery. The inscription, carved in cuneiform script and written in the Assyrian dialect of the Akkadian language, lists the achievements of Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883-859 B.C.), the builder of the palace. After giving his ancestry and royal titles, the Standard Inscription describes Ashurnasirpal's successful military campaigns to east and west and his building works at Nimrud, most importantly the construction of the palace itself. The inscription is thought to have had a magical function, contributing to the divine protection of the king and the palace. Museum: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA.

alb5151854 Pontische Oinochoe' Form I (rider train), clay, quickly turned, painted (ceramic), alternately fired, clay, painted and fired, total: height: 27 cm; diameter: 19.4 cm, ceramic, animals, cavalry, cavalry troops, lion (predators), young man, youth, ornaments, meanders, sphinx, deer, antiquity, Characteristic of the so-called Pontic ceramics is the extensive use of additional colors, which make the vessel appear downright colorful. This oinochoe of form I has a protruding foot, an egg-shaped vessel body and a narrow neck with a plastically protruding collar and a wide cloverleaf mouth. The handle with a central lion's head (incised mane), side arms with stylized monkey heads and a cross-ribbed handle resembling a snake's body ends at the bottom in an anchor palmette. The muzzle collar is black varnished, with the exception of a narrow, recessed picture field below the spout. Here a young man turned to the left, dressed in an apron-like red robe, is depicted. His hand is raised as if in a greeting. On the clay-ground neck of the vessel there is a frieze of four striding lions with their throats torn open and their red tongues stretched out. Each animal has two red and two black legs. The faces of two lions are painted red, the others black. The shoulder of the vessel is decorated with a large double-row, black and red meandering pattern. The empty spaces of the pattern alternately contain sphinxes and deer. Two of the eight sphinxes have two red legs. The seven deer are marked by white dots as fallow deer. A cavalcade of six mounted youths is depicted on the body. They wear chiton-like red coats with short sleeves. With one hand they hold the rein; the other, a branch holding hand, rests on the croup of their animals. All horses have two red and two black legs; three animals have red manes. Under the handle-palmette, two squatting sphinxes support its front-paws on a small life-tree. Under the main frieze a lotus palmette chain with lotus blossoms with red rising cuffs.

alb3675108 Plaque fragment: kneeling lion-headed figure. Culture: Old Assyrian Trading Colony. Dimensions: 3 7/8 x 1 7/8 in. (9.8 x 4.8 cm). Date: ca. 18th century B.C..This figure belongs to a group of carved ivories, mostly furniture elements, probably found at the site of a palace at Acemhöyük in central Anatolia. Most of the ivories depict imagery borrowed and transformed from Egyptian sources, such as the hybrid creature shown here who combines human and lion features. In Egypt, representations of lioness goddesses appeared as early as the Old Kingdom. This creature, with its kneeling posture and closed mouth, indicated by a diagonal groove, does not appear menacing. Its identity is mysterious, but it appears to have symbolized a benevolent force.The plaque has attachment holes at top and bottom, and probably was used to decorate a piece of furniture. Its overall gray color indicates that the object was exposed to considerable heat, perhaps during the destruction of the palace. Gilding is preserved not only on areas such as the border of the long open kilt, the mane, and the eyes, but along the edges of the mane and the inner line of the bent left arm, which may indicate that much of the surface was originally covered in gold leaf. The pupil of the eye was hollowed to receive an inlay, now missing. The mane is stylized to resemble a wig rather than tufts of animal fur. The left arm is bent at the elbow, with the fist held to the chest, while the right grasps a flowering plant stem. The clearly human torso shows no indication of gender. The lower body is depicted kneeling, with one leg exposed and the other covered by the long kilt. A nearly identical plaque, in which the figure faces right, is also in the Metropolitan Museum's collection (36.70.15, 37.413.3). Both plaques have been reconstructed from two halves, broken at the waist; in this example, the upper half is numbered 36.70.14 and the lower half 37.143.4. Museum: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA.

alb3630788 Senwosret III as a Sphinx. Dimensions: L. 73 × W. 29.5 × H. 42.5 cm, 114.3 kg (28 3/4 × 11 5/8 × 16 3/4 in., 252 lb.). Dynasty: Dynasty 12. Reign: reign of Senwosret III. Date: ca. 1878-1840 B.C..Because of their strength, ferocity, imposing mane, and awesome roar, lions were associated with kingship since prehistoric times. As divine guardians against evil, they also symbolized in cosmic myths the place on the horizon where the sun was reborn every day. With the body of a lion and the head of a human, the sphinx symbolically combined the power of the lion with the image of the reigning king. In this magnificent example, the face belongs to Senwosret III of Dynasty 12 whose features are very distinctive (see 26.7.1394). He wears a pleated linen headcloth, called a nemes headdress, which is symbolic of kingship. The nemes is surmounted by a cobra, which represents the goddess Udjo, one of the protectors of the king. The cobra's hood and head were either carved separately or they were repaired in antiquity, for there is an ancient dowel hole drilled into the place where the cobra's upright body would be. While the Egyptians viewed the standing sphinx as a conqueror, the crouching sphinx was a guardian of sacred places. Thus pairs of sphinxes flanked avenues or entrances to important buildings. This sphinx was carved from a single block of beautifully grained anorthosite gneiss from quarries in Nubia. The sculptor has used the pattern in the stone to great effect on the body of the lion and has masked the potentially awkward transition from animal body to human head with the headdress and the stylized pattern representing the lion's mane. Note the difference between the ordered long strands of the mane in front and the short, overlapping tufts on the back of the shoulders. Below the beard, a palace facade (serekh) is incised topped by a falcon and the symbol for the sky. Both the king's Horus name (divine of thrones) and his throne name (shining are the life forces [kas] of Re) are written in the serekh. Museum: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA.