How Art Made the World

by Nigel Spivey

  We are immediately struck by this flair when we gaze on the various representations of Ashurbanipal as the dauntless lion-slayer. Beyond any emulation of Gilgamesh, there are further symbolic elements here – the king asserting his mastery over the ‘king of the beasts’, the king keeping his subjects safe from a predator (lions were still part of the local fauna when Layard was in Iraq).Yet the sculptors have not contented themselves with formulaic motifs.There is a strong sense of ‘documentary’ realism here.We are shown, quite candidly, how Ashurbanipal conducted his sport. It seems to take place in some kind of park: above this enclosure, at a safe distance and height, spectators are gathered, some of them with picnics.The prey is brought in a cage to its hunter. A minion on top of the cage releases lions in the king’s direction, before shutting himself into a smaller, self-protective cage. Guards with large dogs stand at the edge of the enclosure, ready to block any big-cat escape.The king is mounted on a chariot, ready to shoot with his bow. Supplied with arrows by beardless eunuchs nearby, he can hardly miss. But there is no shortage of drama as recorded on the reliefs. One of the loosened lions seems nearly upon Ashurbanipal and his shield-man, as the darts are fired, although attendants with spears may hold a lion at bay, the kill is reserved for the king. Another lion is caught in the motion of leaping, using a ‘freeze-frame’ technique that anticipates animated cartoons; the lion is shown at three moments of action, before being caught by an arrow in mid-flight.

  42 (top) Relief from the reign of Ashurnasirpal II, 883–59 BC. Ashurnasirpal’s great palace at Nimrud was first excavated by Layard in 1845–51.The lion hunt had already become part of Assyrian royal iconography.

  43 (above) A detail of the lion-hunt scene from the palace of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, c. 650 BC. The lion is clearly in distress and its death throes are accurately recorded.

  All of this looks acutely observed. If the artists did not feel some empathy with the victims of the hunt, they at least recorded the throes of wounding and death in the spirit of pathological diagnosis.We see a lioness hit by three arrows. At least one bolt has entered her spine, and accordingly caused paralysis of the lower limbs. Elsewhere we find a sensitive study of a lion in distress (Fig. 43).The animal is hunched and spewing blood, with an arrow lodged deep in its forequarters.Veins on its muzzle are prominent; its claws are stretched in a final effort to grip the ground and stay upright; its eyes have sunk into the fixity of astonishment and absence that is the sight of death.

  So Ashurbanipal advertised his dominion over lions. As for his prowess in fighting fellow humans, this was a more complex story to relate. Embellishing both his own quarters and a room in the palace of his grandfather Sennacherib with similar compositions, Ashurbanipal chose to display his achievement of victory over Elam, a state that lay to the southeast of the Tigris valley in what is now southern Iran. Ashurbanipal quarrelled with Teumman, king of the Elamites, and c. 658–7 BC launched a punitive invasion.The decisive battle, it seems, was fought by the site of a mound called Til-Tuba. From the account of Ashurbanipal (logged in cuneiform records as well as the two sets of friezes), it was more of a massacre. Certainly, the main impression made by the reliefs is that of a one-sided mêlée.The Elamites are made distinctive by their headgear, a sort of knotted bandana, but it is easy enough to pick them out as the ones in retreat and trouble. Closer inspection of the registers, combined with a knowledge of events derived from texts, reveals that this is not however a panoramic snapshot, but the visual unfolding of a story that has a beginning, middle and end. The diplomatic incident that caused the war is shown (an insulting message on a tablet from Teumman); a number of key protagonists are picked out and given captions of direct speech; and various post-conflict resolutions are specified, including select scenes of punishment and torture. A separate relief puts the seal on victory with a vignette of Ashurbanipal and his queen dining luxuriantly in a verdant enclave, and the head of Teumman dangling among the foliage.

  There is, then, a defined plot to these Assyrian war reliefs. Arguably, Ashurbanipal’s campaign against Elam is done as a three-act drama.What will confuse most modern viewers, accustomed to reading texts on a page, is the arrangement of episodes, lacking obvious sequential direction either from left to right, or top to bottom. But perhaps what is more unsettling here is the absence of any emotional engagement. By contrast to the lion-hunting scenes, the epic of Til-Tuba is devoid of any effort to convey the realities of pain.The sheer quantity of death, ignominy and retribution is abundant, but no one is shown wincing or screaming. In this sense it is a totally impassive piece of storytelling.

  The same observation might also be made of Egyptian narrative art. From the earliest examples of visual storytelling in Egypt – notably the Narmer Palette, an engraved stone of c. 3000 BC – through to the large-scale temple reliefs of later pharaohs, the primary purpose is that of testifying to supreme power. Ancient Egypt was not a culture without an oral and literary tradition of myths – fables about deities, folksy tales about shipwrecked sailors, and so on – but the repeated theme of stories chosen for public viewing was basically a single message: the king always prevails over his enemies. Witness the scenes carved on temple walls in and around Luxor, including the campaigns of Seti I and Rameses II as recorded at Karnak, and the wars of Rameses III as massively inscribed at Medinet Habu.The pharaoh looms over all other figures: with outstretched bow aboard a colossal chariot, he rides full tilt at and through the enemy. Captions may be added to the scene: they seem somewhat redundant, given that the action is so obvious. ‘ … smiting the Asiatics, beating down the Hittites, slaying their chiefs, toppled in their blood, charging among them like a tongue of fire, making them into that which is not.’

  As with the Assyrian reliefs, thousands of figures are shown either in violent throes of death or else on their knees and begging for their lives. But, amid this tumult, is anyone – the rampant pharaoh included – showing any kind of emotion? No, none at all. Again we are confronted by a vista of mass suffering in which there appears to be no attempt on the part of the artists to describe any details of pathos or agony. To borrow a distinction made by the art historian Ernst Gombrich, it is as if the purpose of visual storytelling in Egypt and Assyria were to relate what happened, but not how it happened.

  Egyptian art was, as already discussed (see page), essentially non-illusionistic. The sculptors who showed Rameses II scattering his foes were employed to emphasize the divine status of the pharaoh, not to render an eye-witness or even convincing account of battle and capitulation. Clearly it was not a concern of theirs to make the viewers of this scene feel as if they were really present.

  This is very much at odds with not only the aims of modern cinema, but also the objective of much visual storytelling in Western art since the late thirteenth century, when European painters and sculptors representing gospel stories made strenuous efforts to engage beholders, especially in pictures and sculptures of Christ’s Passion – the ordeals of Jesus Christ condemned to crucifixion. So when was it that artists first tried to make us care?

  SUSPENDING DISBELIEF: THE NARRATIVE GIFT OF CLASSICAL GREECE

  Mount Helicon, for the ancient Greeks, was home to the Muses, the nine delightful daughters of Zeus who inspired mortals to do wonderful things not only in literature, music and dance, but in philosophy and astronomy too. In fact the Greeks owed cultural and intellectual debts to neighbouring civilizations far senior to their own. ‘East of Helicon’, these included the various kingdoms and empires of Anatolia and Mesopotamia; Egypt’s influence, already encountered in Chapter 3, was also substantial.

  Stories from the Orient undoubtedly filtered into the repertoire of what we call Greek myths. (One simple index of this is the alarming number of lions featured in Greek mythology, bearing in mind that lions were never part of the local wildlife.) But whatever was borrowed by the Greeks, they put their own very distinctive stamp on it. As Gombrich saw, what Homer did with a story was unparalleled in any previous literature
. Effectively, he anticipated Aristotle’s principle of suspending disbelief.To make his audience feel as if they were witnesses to battle on the plains of Troy, or lurching around in high seas with Odysseus and his crew, Homer focused vividly upon how a story went: how one thing led to another, how the characters were feeling as it happened, how those characters expressed themselves – and so on.

  E.H. GOMBRICH: THE STORY OF ART AND THE ART OF THE STORY

  IT HAS SOLD more than 6 million copies worldwide and been translated into over 30 languages, including, to its author’s pride, Icelandic and Albanian. The Story of Art by Ernst Gombrich (1909–2003) must rank as the most engaging account of art history ever written. Originally announced in the 1950 autumn catalogue of its publisher (Phaidon Press) as ‘a book to be enjoyed by young readers and by adults with young minds’, it is often cited as the first (or the only) art book that many people possess.

  Allegedly dictated to a secretary over just six weeks, Gombrich’s text remains eminently readable. He was, in person, a genial raconteur, and in his writing always took care to avoid obscurity, keeping his readers both instructed and entertained. For Gombrich, even complex and ponderous issues of art-historical interpretation could be explained in terms that children could understand. (He once summarized his doctoral dissertation on the Italian Mannerist frescoes of the Palazzo Te at Mantua as ‘a fairy story about a prince who built a beautiful palace’.) And his own narrative panache – unusual, if not despised, in modern academic circles – was in keeping with his sense of storytelling’s radical importance in the history of art. In another widely read book, Art and Illusion (1960), Gombrich asked why it was that one culture in particular, that of the ancient Greeks, had developed illusionistic art, which imitated reality so closely that it caused viewers to confuse art with illusion. What had brought about this Greek Revolution (see page)? His answer was unequivocal. The illusionism of Greek art was rooted in the illusionism of their storytelling style. From Homer onwards, the poets and dramatists of Greece favoured mimesis, or imitation. Their stories were almost invariably mythical, yet they peopled these myths with believable characters:‘rounded’ characters described as if actively alive, and using direct speech.Was Homer himself present when his heroes Achilles and Hector shouted challenges at each other and joined combat? Of course not.Yet the poet relates exactly what happened on that distant occasion with all the enthusiasm and immediacy of an on-the-spot reporter. For artists and sculptors, Gombrich argued, this was like a challenge to their respective skills. Could a painting or a sculpture extract such empathy or engagement from its viewers?

  A perfect example of this comes in Book 9 of Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus, attempting to get home by sea after the end of the Trojan War, is forced to anchor off a strange island. He goes ashore with some of his crew, taking a jar of wine and seeking hospitality. But the island is occupied by Cyclops, one-eyed giants who live in caves with their flocks of sheep. Imprisoned by a giant called Polyphemus, Odysseus comes up with a ruse that involves getting the Cyclops drunk, then plunging a hot, sharp stake into his eye.The blinded Polyphemus squats at the mouth of his cave, blocking escape, so Odysseus and his men get out by clinging to the woolly underbellies of the Cyclops’ sheep as the herd files out to pasture.

  So what impact did this elaborately woven storytelling technique have upon the visual arts? The answer to that question might be outlined in three distinct proposals.

  Stories such as Homer told, circulating at large in the Greek world from c. 750 BC onwards, encouraged artists to produce illustrations of those stories, commonly on the sides of vessels used for the formal symposia (drinking parties) at which poetic recitations were heard.

  The descriptive detail of Homer’s storytelling proved stylistically formative. So although the first narrative scenes on Greek pottery were geometric in style – composed of stick figures difficult to identify – artists were soon striving for a more illusionistic effect. An early depiction of the Polyphemus story, for example, shows the Cyclops emitting a cry as the stake is plunged into his eye.Within the same medium of painted pottery, we see artists attempting to include more references to the story, such as a couple of dismembered limbs in the Cyclops’ grasp (Fig. 44).

  Ultimately, Greek artists sought to invest their work with such expressive realism as to create a suspension of disbelief on the part of the viewer. Some kind of receding perspective was developed in large-scale painting of the fifth century BC, especially for theatrical scene design (though little direct evidence of this survives).The three-dimensional medium of sculpture, however, yielded more opportunities for creating complex narrative tableaux, with life-sized scale aiding lifelike effects.

  Proposals 1 and 2 are debatable, but there is no doubt regarding the end achievement of Greek art as summarized in proposal 3. And there is no better way of gauging the extent of that achievement than to witness how three Greek sculptors presented the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus to a Roman emperor in the early first century AD.

  THE UNIVERSAL CYCLOPS

  FOR THE CHILDREN of a certain tribe in Papua New Guinea, his name is Baya Horo: a monster of gigantic size, whose teeth are long and sharp, and highly suitable for munching his favourite victims – children. He has one huge eye and he lives in a cave. Using masks, the children play games in which they enact the terrifying stories associated with Baya Horo.The stories are of local origin, passed down from the elders of the tribe by word of mouth.

  Baya Horo is not Polyphemus. No one supposes that the tales of Homer’s Odyssey somehow penetrated the dense rainforests of Papua New Guinea. But Baya Horo shares some key monstrous features with the Cyclops, and comparable similarities have been noticed in diverse storytelling cultures from all around the world – Arabic, Slavonic, Nordic and so on. In the collection known as The Arabian Nights (or The Thousand and One Nights, as it was introduced to European readers in the early eighteenth century), for example, we find a tale about Sinbad the Sailor in which the hero and his shipmates are stranded on an island, and encounter a savage giant ‘as tall as a palm tree’, who shuts them in his palace and begins to eat them each evening, one by one.How will they escape? While the giant is absent, Sinbad hatches a plan.There are some large iron roasting-spits to hand. Sinbad and his companions wait for the monster to return, devour one of their number, then fall asleep.The captives heat these rods in the giant’s own oven and drive them into his eyes.They dodge past his sightless efforts to catch them, and get away on rafts.The furious giant stands on the shore, lobbing boulders after them …

  We have, so to speak, heard it before. Or rather, the story of an adventure involving close confinement with a cannibalistic giant, and escape brought about by blinding the predator, is part of a worldwide web of mythology. It is further proof that storytelling is a generically human habit – and suggests, again, that we of today are essentially telling the same stories as were told thousands of years ago.

  SPERLONGA: STORIES BY TORCHLIGHT

  It was in September 1957 that a road-building project along the Italian coast between Rome and Naples brought to light a hoard of thousands of fragments of marble statuary inside a large cave.This cave was very close to the shoreline, and sea water was channelled into it as part of an extensive architectural complex suspected to be a villa retreat of the emperor Tiberius – successor to Augustus in 14 AD.The cave (spelunca in Latin) had been a celebrated site for centuries, and gave its name to the nearby hilltop town of Sperlonga. A number of antiquities had already been recovered from the site, which senior locals still fondly recall as ideal for amorous meetings. But the discovery of these multiple fragments in 1957 caused international excitement. A number of them clearly belonged to some dramatic ensemble of figures. One piece carried an inscription attesting the workmanship of a trio of Greek artists: Athenodoros, Hagesandros and Polydoros. Could these be the same three sculptors from the island of Rhodes who, by Roman tradition, had created one of the best-known statues from Classical antiquity –
the Laocoön group – famously displayed in the Vatican since its excavation at Rome in 1506?

  44 A Greek vase painting from the 6th century BC, showing the blinding of Polyphemus by Odysseus and his companions. Polyphemus holds the legs of one of his victims; as the stake is driven into his eye, a cup of wine is also offered.The snake above signifies danger. So this is a synoptic overview of the story.

  45 (top) View of the grotto at Sperlonga as it looks today.

  46 (above) A partially reconstructed plaster sculpture of The Blinding of Polyphemus in the Museo Archeologico at Sperlonga.

  Excitement was local, too.When lorries came to transport the marble pieces for study and restoration in Rome, the inhabitants of Sperlonga set up blockades.They were not going to lose control of such a significant find.

  So what did all these pieces of polished marble represent? At first it was thought that another version of the Laocoön story had been found. Laocoön was the Trojan priest who, when a huge wooden horse was left outside the city of Troy, voiced his suspicion of the object: ‘I fear the Greeks, even when they come bearing gifts’. (The story of this fateful gift was scripted in the late first century BC by Virgil in Book 2 of his Aeneid – the epic poem of Rome’s mythic origins.) It eventually became clear, however, that while tales of Troy were among the subjects of these sculptures at Sperlonga, the hero of the cave’s thematic ‘programme’ was from the Greek side. Odysseus, or Ulixes (Ulysses) as the Romans knew him, was known to be a favoured alter ego of the emperor Tiberius.The hero’s quick-mindedness and opportunistic cunning endeared him to a politician notorious for those qualities, so it is plausible that Tiberius himself commissioned the quartet of sculptural scenes once installed in the seaside cave.