Lamassu Essay. Objects as History.

Camilla Angel Hopkinson

1 Objects as History Professor Bradley Collins March 12, 2014 The Lamassus at The Met

The two Lamassus at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City have retained their menacing and awe-inspiring air of regal power and grandeur for nearly three thousand years. The Human-Headed Winged Lion and the Human-Headed Winged Bull (both called Lamassu) are from the Assyrian city of Nimrud, which was formerly Kalhu, in the ancient Near East during the ninth century B.C.E.1 Under King Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883-859 B.C.E.), Nimrud was developed from a regional town into the capital of the Assyrian empire, and a 120-foot-thick wall was built around it for protection.2 Within this city perimeter and inside the palace, the Lamassus were probably placed just outside of the king’s throne room, flanking the doorway, as they do at the Met Museum. Everyone who came to see the king would have to pass the massive creatures and when they did they would be struck by the greatness of the king and the extent of his power.3 The animals’ monstrous size ensures that anyone coming toward the Lamassus (and toward the king behind them) feels threatened. The guardian figures are 10 feet and 3½ inches tall,4 and each stands on a roughly 6-inch-high platform. The top of my head just reaches the bottoms of the beards that descend from the statues’ identical human faces, and I am almost 5 feet 9 inches tall. Both of these sculptures, carved in relief from alabaster gypsum stone, only protrude partway from the surrounding wall, and there is not much negative space within the figures, which contributes to sense of their weighty, imposing presence.

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Stokstad, 24-5.

Heilbrunn, lamassu.

3 Stokstad, 25.

4 Stokstad, 24.

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Friends, enemies, and demons were all the targets of the intimidation, for the Lamassus also served as apotropaic figures, warding off evil and protecting the king and his court. The large scale of the Lamassus is what makes them so domineering and foreboding, and therefore it is what made them great guardians.

Despite my logical reasoning that the Lamassus cannot harm me, they make me uneasy, and my instinct is not to linger around these stone giants. So I find myself edging around them, cautiously. At first I notice that both of the human heads are topped with triple horned headdresses that were traditionally only worn by gods.5 So the Lamassus and the king they stand for are deified, and onlookers are given a visual directive to worship the king as they would worship a god. The large eagle wings extending from both of their backs add to the sense of divinity because with wings, these animals can swiftly fly closer to the gods.

The sculptors gave each of the Lamassus a fifth leg to create two distinctive, strong visual images when the animal is seen head-on and in profile. From the front, the Lamassu seems to stand steadfast, with both front feet firmly planted. But then, as the viewer comes alongside the creature, the fifth leg creates an illusion of movement, as though the Lamassu is walking forward.

After spending about fifteen minutes gazing at the creatures I dared to take a closer look at their facial features and the details of their bodies. Only then did I begin to see the differences between the two Lamassus. The lion on the left side of the doorway and the bull to the right are similar from the front view and their overall physical forms are comparable, but on closer inspection I see that their anatomies vary and their fur and skin have different, stylized textures and decorations.

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Heilbrunn, lamassu.

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The lion and the bull are both depicted naturalistically in that their muscles are strong but not exaggerated; their bones, ligaments, and paws or hooves, respectively, appear accurate and seem to indicate that the sculptors studied the animals carefully. And yet, simultaneously, the striped pattern of curls on the beards and the way the feathers of the wings are repeated in a consistent, decorative pattern are very stylized features, and not naturalistic. All of the patterns work with the plain marble around them to create a visual, textural balance, but the details of these stylized patterns are where some textural differences occur.

The lion has a pattern to represent fur on its chest and the edges of its stomach that is reminiscent of the feather pattern on the wings. The bull has curls, just like those in the beards, which extend down his chest between strips of feather-like shapes, and are also in geometric patches on his back. The level of detail in the pattern and the amount of decoration on the bull exceeds that on the lion. The bull also has male genitals that are visible in the profile view. There is even a curly flourish extending from them, which is similar to the spirals on its knees.

It makes sense that references to the bull’s fecundity would be included in the sculpture because the bull was often portrayed as a ritualistic animal that represented male strength and fertility, both attributes that the king would presumably want to be associated with. The lion is another animal used to represent kings because it holds a powerful position at the top of the food chain, and it is known to be ferocious.

The Lamassus are strong representations of the widespread power and prosperity that began to appear in the early civilizations of the ancient Near East. Members of these societies could focus on art and culture rather than food and survival because the civilizations were cultivating infrastructures to support their societies. These Lamassus are themselves works of art, but by guarding the leader of one of the early civilizations that fostered art making, it could be

Camilla Angel Hopkinson said that the Lamassus also played a role in facilitating the production of other artworks. By providing a sense of security the Lamassus may have contributed to the cultural and artistic progress of the ancient Near East.

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Bibliography

"Human-headed winged lion (lamassu) [Excavated at Nimrud (ancient Kalhu), northern Mesopotamia]" (32.143.2) In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/32.143.2. (October 2006) Stokstad, Marilyn. Art History, 3rd edition. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2008), 24-5, 1197.

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