My Favorite Hunting Plate
In late October, I gave an invited presentation at the symposium, “The Visual World of Persianate Culture,” at Edinburgh University (http://persianconference2014.wordpress.com/programme/). My topic, “Kushano-Sasanian Art in Bactria: An Example of the Visual Culture of Greater Iran,” concerned the stylistically varied and insufficiently studied art of Bactria (present-day Afghanistan) under Persian Sasanian rule during the 3rd and 4th centuries CE. The next week, in London, I attended a workshop on Persian manuscripts at the British Library (http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/2014/09/one-day-symposium-british-library-persian-manuscripts-collections-and-research.html).
During a break in the proceedings, I picked up the current issue of IDP News, the newsletter of the International Dunhuang Project, based at the BL. (In brief, the IDP makes information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artifacts from the Dunhuang Caves in western China and other archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road available on the Internet: http://idp.bl.uk/pages/archives_newsletter.a4d.) I was struck by a section in the newsletter, “Our Favorite Items,” a series of two-paragraph essays by various scholars who work on various Silk Road subjects.
With Kushano-Sasanian images vividly in mind, I asked myself, what’s your favorite item? It is easily the gilt silver plate illustrated here. Kept in The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, the plate shows a horseman, wearing a ram’s-horn headdress, confronting attacking boars in a marshy landscape. Unlike most Sasanian plates that show the king or a noble hunting in a static or hieratic manner, the circular frame of this plate contains a drama filled with movement, violent and subtle. As the rider brings his sword down on the lower boar’s neck, a second boar bursts into the scene, startling the horse. To stay in the saddle, the hunter grabs its neck and pulls up his legs tightly against the animal’s body. In avoiding its attackers, the horse raises its forelegs, on line with and echoing the hunter’s bent leg, so that we see a jumble of narrow limbs contrasting with the broad shapes of the intruding boar.
The varied textures of clothing, hair, riding equipment, and landscape motifs create rich and contrasting patterns that add to the plate’s visual interest, which is further heightened by the gilding of selected areas (not all of which remains). In contrast with the more typical profiles of the hunter and the boars, the three-quarters view of the horse’s head adds to the dynamics of the composition. This echoes the Hellenizing art of Bactria, which had been ruled by Alexander the Great and his successors 400 years earlier, while boars in a thicket of reeds is a device known in Roman art. Such mixing of Greek, Roman and Persian styles and motifs is a characteristic of Kushano-Sasanian art.
I wonder what are the “favorite items” of my ISAW colleagues!