Laurel Bestock (Brown University)
“Seeing and Being Seen: Ancient Egyptian serdab Statues and their Contexts”
In the Egyptian Old Kingdom (ca. 2650-2120 BCE) many elite tombs were provided with small rooms that scholars term “serdabs.” These rooms were above-ground parts of the tomb chapel and were designed to hold a statue or statues. They are characterized by their inaccessibility—once the statue was emplaced, the room was sealed, sometimes with a slit left through which the statue could see out, but never with any means for a visitor to the tomb to see in. The invisibility of the serdab statues was essential to their function, which was to receive offerings from visitors to the tomb and, it will be argued, to perpetuate social relationships that included an element of hierarchy across the boundary of death. What happens when such a statue is removed from its original context and displayed in a museum? This paper will address both how such statues allowed their original contexts to function and how different museums have chosen to engage with their visibility or invisibility in ways that engage seeing and power in today’s world.
David Kertai (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden)
An Ornamental Monumentality: On the Interplay Between Architecture and Sculpture in Assyrian Royal Palaces
Assyrian palaces are best known for the sculptures that decorated the inner walls of their most monumental rooms. These sculptures are characterized by their large size, their overall shallow depth and the prominence given to inscribed texts. Four royal palaces decorated with sculptures have been excavated from Late Assyrian period (ca. 900-612 BCE). These provide a detailed view on the different sculptural programs. And yet much remains unclear about the roles these sculptures played in their architectural settings. This is partially due to a persistent Modernist
focus on space, morphology, and typology to the detriment of the central role played by ornament in the Assyrian conception of architecture. Understanding the architecture of these palaces as forms of monumental ornamentation, this paper explores the central roles played by sculptures in providing meaning to the spaces they decorated and the sensorial experiences they might have evoked in individuals navigating the palaces.
Patricia Eunji Kim (NYU)
“The Gallery of Shield-Portraits at the Delian Monument to Mithradates VI”
In 102/101 BCE, the Athenian priest Helianax commissioned an unusual monument at Delos on behalf of the Pontic king Mithradates VI: a rectangular distyle in antis building was designed as a gallery of the king’s most important friends and generals. The monument boasted a total of thirteen shield-portraits (hopla). While each shield was carved into the surface of the masonry, the portrait busts were sculpted separately and then attached to or “hung” on those walls by iron pins. Inscriptions accompany each of the portraits, guiding the viewer with information about the person’s name, political role, and familial connections. The highly curated and particularly arranged display of honorific portraiture in a gallery of shields-as-art makes the Delian monument unique, prompting two questions for exploration. First, the spatial and sensory conditions that the building created demand analysis; how might we articulate the viewing experiences that the monument’s architecture and sculpture afforded? Second, the Hellenistic-period phenomenon of the shield-portrait is a distinctive category of representation that extended personhood—not only on the battlefield, but also in significant cultural and political arenas; what does the shield-portrait reveal about the aesthetic logics of weaponry in the ancient world?
Max Peers (Brown University)
“Buildings Set in Stone: Architecture and Sculpture from Living Bedrock on Punic-Roman Sardinia”
This paper examines three structures from Punic-Roman Sardinia that blur the lines between sculpture, architecture, and geology in that each is partially carved from living bedrock. As such, the material and spatial characteristics of the different stages of construction—the quarrying, masonry, decoration, etc.—are collapsed into a single locus of activity and must be conceived of together, just as the ancient builders probably did. I examine the phases of, and individuals involved in, the construction of these structures through the lens of the chaîne opératoire, to understand who might have worked on the different elements of the structure, what skills they brought, and how they worked together with the stone in situ and made on site. Through my analysis, I demonstrate how the natural environment and local stone determined designs and building practices. The case studies I consider imbricate loci of work to a single location, which reveals a complex set of factors at play at these building sites, but I also argue that these conclusions concerning stone in states from raw and living to finished and installed, are applicable in other contexts in which local stone is being used for architecture and sculpture.
Meghan Rubenstein (Colorado College)
“Monster Mouth Doorways and the Nature of Maya Architecture”
Maya artists regularly collapsed boundaries separating the natural and supernatural realms, depicting rulers, ancestors, and deities together with sentient objects and zoomorphic beings. This paper explores how architectural sculpture reinforces that view of an animate and fluid world, looking specifically at the extraordinary, though perhaps misnamed, monster mouth doorways in the Yucatán peninsula. I propose these striking tooth-lined portals marked a point of transition between the natural and supernatural worlds, underscoring the ability of architecture to realize abstract concepts rooted in Maya ontology. This research, which analyzes iconography, materiality, and sensory-oriented design, also speaks to the phenomenological experience of monumental architecture during the Late Classic period (ca. 600-900 CE). The study of this subset of architectural sculpture elucidates the nature of Maya architecture, allowing us to better understand, from our modern perspective, the people who conceptualized, built, and used these monuments.
Nancy S. Steinhardt (University of Pennsylvania)
“Architectural Sculpture in the Ancient World: the View from China”
This paper seeks to define architectural sculpture in China before the year 1500 CE. It begins by confirming that relief sculpture has been standard on interior walls of tombs and interior and exterior rock-carved surfaces from the late centuries BCE and early CE centuries. The paper argues that, since those times, relief sculpture is interchangeable with wall painting as the primary means of narration, and that often an inscription is not necessary to understand what is represented. In Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian contexts the narration can be considered iconography, is inherently repetitive, and rarely experimental. With this background, we turn to five highly important types of Chinese architectural sculpture that, it will be proposed, have unique Chinese contexts: the gate-tower, with a focus on first- and second-century CE examples; exterior surfaces of Liao-dynasty (907-1125) monumental pagodas; eleventh- and twelfth- century examples of an interior, wooden wall technique known as xiaomuzuo (small-scale carpentry); marble door-pillows and related sculpture positioned only at the foot of a door; and two examples of miniature stages made at China’s premier porcelain kiln in Jingdezhen. In the
conclusion, the paper seeks to determine if similar kinds of architectural sculpture existed in other parts of the Ancient World.