Winckelmann in Nineveh

Yannick Le Pape

doi:10.21825/jolcel.vi6.11749

Abstract

By the middle of the 19th century, French and British diplomats managed excavations in the biblical land of legendary Assyrian kings, where Nineveh had been buried long before Greek classical era. Here was the opportunity to reconsider the way Winckelmann cristallised the art of Antiquity, but when Assyrian remains entered in museums, they had precisely been evaluated under the reputation of Greek art inherited from the History of the Art of Antiquity, in which few Near Eastern items were said to be the exact opposites of classical beauty: scientists questioned art values of such strange objects, and museums themselves hesitated to exhibit this unexpected heritage so close to Greek "high art" (Edmund Oldfield). However, Assyria had got too many supporters in a few years to be forgotten a second time, and instead of highlighting the value of Hellenic unrivalled items, the « chain of art » principle figured from Winckelmann was used to support how Assyrian remains, at the very end, had influenced the brighter well-known classical masterpieces.

Highlights

By the middle of the nineteenth century, French and British diplomats managed excavations in the land of Assyrian kings, where Nineveh had been buried long before classical Greece
We may notice how such gradual typology of Antiquity in museums deals with the idea of progress in civilizations built by British scholars in the mid-nineteenth century from the “Great Chain of Art.”[61]. Museums, in short, promoted an evolutionary history of art that precisely reminded of how Winckelmann discredited art from Persia and Phoenicia on the grounds that these civilizations skipped the feeling of freedom (Freiheit) that would prevail in classical Greece
Layard himself changed his mind on Assyrian art[82] and wrote that “it has taken its place amongst other styles of ancient art.”[83]. For the opening of the Nineveh Court, a kind of a motley replica of an Assyrian building in Crystal Palace, near London in 1854, he was proud to mention in the guidebook “the sculptures [...] which were the origin of some of the ornaments of classic Greece.”[84]. In Nineveh and its Remains, he published a few drawings of reliefs from Lycia and from Xanthos to demonstrate how sculpture “is peculiarly Assyrian in its treatment,” and he insisted on the resemblance with images from low-reliefs and seals from Assyria

Summary

Dreams and contest over a lost empire

Nineveh was one of the most important cities of the ancient Assyrian Empire, located in the North of Mesopotamia (where nowadays is the upper fringe of Iraq), and dominating a large part of the Near-East from the tenth till the seventh century before Christ. Austen Layard, the consul who was to manage the first complete British excavation in Assyria from 1845, wrote in one of its archeological stories that “a case scarcely three feet square enclosed all that remained, of the great city of Nineveh, but of Babylon itself!”9. The Athenaeum, October 26, 1846, recalled how France was generous towards Botta while Great Britain neglected Layard’s discoveries: “It is painful, after witnessing this munificent patronage of science by the French Government, to think that, up to this moment, nothing has been done to assist Mr Layard in his researches by our own” (“Mr Layard’s Excavations at Mossul, Fine Arts, Foreign correspondence, September 3rd”: 1016–1017). A Memoir of Major-General Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, 172

Faith and fashion

Near Eastern relics and their reception in a classical world

Marbles battle

Down the art evolution

Nineveh’s revenge