A cuneiform kiss

 

Babylonian clay tablet, 1800 BC

Seeing the Mesopotamian wing at the Met in New York as a child left me dazed and transfixed, And being so small, these Assyrian statues and bas-reliefs appeared to me gigantic and other-worldly. 

When my father took me there I immediately made my way through the main hall, and drawn like a magnet, I'd find myself lost in the solemn section of bas-reliefs that lined the walls. 

But these early visits to this new 'mysterious world' right in the heart of a modern city locked themselves into my imagination forever. When in grade school we studied Cuneiforms, and the very beginnings of what we now know as writing, I became further obsessed. I remember that my crayon drawings became childishly imitative of these things. 

Ideas as pictures worked much better for me at that age than the sentence structures being drilled into me by an old bag of an English teacher although I instinctively loved any sort of her untidy chaos on the blackboard. 

So when the New Times ran an article about the earliest illustrations of the kiss, it immediately ignited my long-dormant affection for these clay sculptures. 

Best to read the article yourselves. Though it's a sweet Valentine Day's story, its the small clay sculpture pictured top, that is the real star.

This (above) is from the vast British Museum collection from Nineveh which is the current city of Mosel in Iraq. Sadly, many of these temples were sacked by ISIS fighters after the American invasion. 

But what I love in these bas-reliefs today, after fifty years of painting pictures on a flat surface, are the curious resemblances to painters such as Van Gogh and Gauguin. Gauguin's use of the flat antique profiles are well known and easily calculable, but also are the wavy seas that Vincent used so freely in his skies. 

These are universal forms and they can be found throughout art history, and just for fun, here is an example from the church at Moissac, in south-east France. Although no longer the bas-relief of Mesopotamia, a full-fledged Jeremiah with a lovely flowing beard adorns a center post of the south portal on this amazing church. My personal regret of oceanic proportions, is that I have not yet visited it, but I will.