Monumental Art of the Assyrian Empire: Dynamics of Composition Styles.

• Author: Foster, Karen Polinger
• Position: Review

Monumental Art of the Assyrian Empire: Dynamics of Composition Styles. By PAULINE ALBENDA. Sources and Monographs on the Ancient Near East, vol. 3.1. Malibu, Calif.: UNDENA PUBLICATIONS, 1998. Pp. iv + 72, maps, 27 figures, 29 plates. $13 (paper).

In this monograph, Pauline Albenda continues her series of investigations into Assyrian wall reliefs, focusing here on the innovations seen within standardized decorative systems. Reviewing the Metropolitan Museum of Art's reinstallation of its ancient Near Eastern collections, Holland Cotter writes that "Assyrian art is about winning through intimidation" (New York Times, 22 October 1999, p. E39). What Albenda has done is to analyze the artistic strategies that led successive Assyrian kings to victory.

According to the author, there were five basic stylistic principles: (1) activity, both subtle and vigorous; (2) symmetry, especially mirror reflection, repetition, and rotation; (3) centrality, or the ordering of subject matter in tripartite lateral sequences; (4) triangularity, as used particularly in royal lion hunt scenes; and (5) dimensionality, in which human activity is situated in space and time. Each principle is discussed in its own chapter, accompanied by line drawings and photographs in separate sections at the end of the book. While the emphasis throughout is on elucidating royal innovations, only the dimensionality chapter is organized formally by king. It is more or less left to the reader to pull together a list of new devices introduced in specific reigns and to keep the chronology and historical context straight.

For Assurnasirpal II, the new features Albenda identifies include tighter, more precise groupings of subjects, with the lion hunt rendered in a taut triangle of king, prey, and chariot, rather than in its previously linear arrangement. In his battle scene reliefs, the Assyrians progress inexorably at a constant rate of speed, steadfast against the enemy's fragmented directionalism.

At Sargon II's new palace at Khorsabad, there are for the first time double processions, as well as pictorial ordering within and between rooms. His siege reliefs remove the attacked citadel from its formerly central position, focusing instead on the besieging Assyrians. In Sargon II's landscapes, the horizon rises to the top of the panel, setting the Assyrians firmly in foreign parts.

Sennacherib pioneered new vertical alignments among registers, thereby creating tiered depths of field. His...