Mural of the wounded lioness
A mural dating back to the era of King Ashurbanipal (645-635) BC, entitled (The Wounded Lioness)
The lions were released from the cages into the arena, and the guards would lure them to the king's chariot, shoot them with arrows and kill them.
In this mural, the Assyrian sculptor embodied a complete epic work. The wounded lioness was dying because the arrows fatally wounded her, paralyzing her back half. However, she was dragging her front half and trying to stand up to attack her opponents, and she roared her last roar, which was a mixture of screams of pain due to her wounds. Deep, and also her will to cling to life.
The mural is in the British Museum
The murals of hunting lions and wild horses in the palace of King Assyria-bani-Apli are considered among the most important works of art in the history of art in the ancient world. Rather, they are their pinnacle in relation to their time. They gained the admiration of art historians and theorists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and their intense beauty and amazing magic are still captivating and overwhelming the arts. Universal sculptures that speak silently and act far from their limited form.
Where we find the Assyrian artist, in his pursuit of perfection, the power of feeling overcame the will of the mind, and perception overcame the reality of viewing. He was drawn to spontaneity and freedom in exercising his creative role, his creative genius, his superior craftsmanship, his acumen, the spark of his imagination, and his burning attention, which took him to sculpt animal hunting scenes, advancing his free artistic experiments. Freed from his accumulated experiences and from the constraints of previous artistic customs, and abandoning the hidden force that controls his production when executing these works, his artistic aspirations reached the point of creativity. The completion of these panels is considered a revolutionary shift in the concept of Assyrian wall sculpture and a release of the artist’s freedom to imagine, arouse feelings, search for essence, and set the rhythm. Life and choosing the style of symbolism In topics for the purpose of achieving the intended goal, far from its general image or its conformity with reality, so that it is not a simulation or imitation devoid of feelings and emotions, lacking originality and creativity, and without any distortion of the form visible to the eye.
The conflicting themes and ideas met each other and were united in a harmonious sculptural formation that emphasized the artist’s sentimentality and externality and left his chisel to deviate from the restrictive artistic contexts. The artist would sculpt what his eyes recorded in their perception and follow-up of the spontaneity of the strong rhythm in the succession of expressive scenes, the dynamism of the animal’s movement, and what his imagination created with insightful awareness of the feeling. Thus, surrounding its entire formation and construction, realistic and dramatic, together, devoid of simulation of reality, and this stimulates in the artist the spirit of creation and creativity by exploiting the store of artistic accumulations that he has, which gives him freedom of expression, raises astonishment in the eye of the viewer, and arouses in him a lot of excitement of imagination and feelings from which the aesthetic perception detects the power of it. Expression of reality created by the artist By stripping it of time and space and making it unique in its aesthetic meaning despite the apparent cruelty, he placed in it a free and silent eloquence, as silent as the solid stone from which it was carved. This eloquence makes the viewer put his mind and his steps inside the structure of the mural without any intentional awareness.
The artist had a recording eye that captures time and stops it at the dramatic moment that expresses the tension in the movement of animals and the roar of lions in their final flight. It seizes it at the height of the glow of its overwhelming, expressive dramatic effect and employs it in embodying the manifestations of strength, toughness and brutality at their maximum level of realism without exaggeration or affectation before their moment disappears. The disappearance, and as the artist searches for the precise details in expression and execution, he goes beyond natural imitation and depiction of the facts of reality and devotes himself to searching within his inner self to formulate his feelings and put his art at the disposal of these feelings. The artist was expressing his sympathy and bias with the animal’s condition and coping with its torments in the hour of pain and the moment of death He would not have been able to express himself in this way if these scenes had not affected him, so he spread his influence over them between the successive details of the scene, which combined a tight dramatic structure and a cohesive epic narrative, so that he could express those scenes and convey them with authenticity to the eye of the viewer, in order to awaken the sense and awareness of the aesthetic components
Despite the harshness of the scene, it makes him feel and participate with him in coexistence, contemplation, and absorption in those dramatic moments, and since the artistic work is the participating mediator between the artist and the viewer, here the sculptural scene is an entrance and a warning to what can be perceived through contemplation without the mind having a role in empathizing with the scene, because when art is... Traditionally and close to nature, it thus reaches the stage of decadence (returning the chaos of movements to the unity of style - Camus, Albert - about sculpture) and the dying animals here are not an example of dying as much as they carry a meaning for the symbolism of dying and an expression of the painful reality of death and not a recording or pictorial simulation of death in particular. In the scene of the wounded lioness) The difference between expression and recording is clear. Recording is putting the real truth as it is, and expression is putting the real truth in a different form.
Source: websites