<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/16/arts/design/16sasa.html> February 16, 2007 Art Review | 'Art of Sasanian Iran' Flaunting Dominion in Ancient Iran By HOLLAND COTTER
The opening of Asia Society's glinting and glowing show of pre-Islamic art from Iran turned into something of a cliffhanger late last week when dozens of objects coming from Paris were held up by customs at Kennedy International Airport.
The objects — ancient silver dishes, carved document seals and silk textiles — all belong to French museums, including the Louvre, and have for generations. But the United States' longstanding embargo on Iranian imports stipulates that any art objects of Iranian origin, no matter how long they have been elsewhere, can enter this country only with a permit from Washington. Even though Asia Society had such a permit, the art stayed in an airport hangar until the 11th hour, and then was rushed into Manhattan.
As it is, "Glass, Gilding and Grand Design: Art of Sasanian Iran (224-642 A.D.)," is a radical reduction of a much larger exhibition from the Musée Cernuschi in Paris that included loans from Iranian museums impossible to bring to the United States. But with about 70 pieces, the New York version is still substantial. And even if it weren't, we would have to take notice: it is one of the only major exhibitions of Sasanian art in this part of the world in more than 30 years. And it arrives, coincidentally, just as the Bush administration has sharpened its focus on Iran's role in war-ravaged Iraq.
During those 30 years scholars have learned a lot about the Sasanians, though we still don't know very much. For about four centuries they ruled a territory that covered present-day Iran, Iraq, parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan and stretched to North Africa. Their historical role models were the Achaemenid Iranians, who had built Persepolis a millennium earlier. Their rivals were Rome, then Byzantium and, at the very end, early Islamic dynasties.
The Sasanians were lucky with time and place. They came to power when the Silk Road between China and the Mediterranean was in full flow, and they absorbed influences from the many cultures that traveled it. One of the first things you see in the galleries is a silver-and-gilt bowl decorated with a male royal portrait head clearly based on Greco-Roman prototypes, while a wine vessel nearby, in the shape of an antelope's head, has stylistic roots in the remote borderlands of Central Asia.
In art, the Sasanians gave as good as they got, generating widespread and long-lasting influences of their own. Exquisite textiles of Sasanian design have been found in Egypt. And a gorgeous little glass cup in the show — it is purplish-brown, with protruding sensorlike knobs that make it resemble Sputnik — compares to others that ended up in Chinese tombs, Japanese temples and the treasury of San Marco in Venice.
Sasanian art made the rounds. And its wide distribution, combined with uncontrolled excavation, has made it almost impossible to date precisely, or to assign an exact place of origin. Archaeologists and art historians frequently have trouble determining whether something is actually Sasanian or in-the-style-of. (Glass is particularly elusive in this respect.)
Nonetheless, certain types of images seem specific to its imperial culture, namely those that refer to the state religion of Zoroastrianism. But even here cross-cultural sampling prevails.
The religion's principal female deity, Anahita, the goddess of fertility, assumes various guises. In a stucco relief she is a formidable Mesopotamian matron with dangly earrings. But she is also a Hellenistic bacchante scintillating over the surface of a chunky silver vase, now owned by the Louvre. By the time this luxury item emerged from an imperial atelier in the fifth or sixth century, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism and Manichaeism were all practiced within the empire, contributing to its visual eclecticism.
<http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/01/opinion/melik2.php> An exhibition that navigates the Sasanian past without a compass By Souren Melikian Friday, December 1, 2006 PARIS
Commenting on the distant past of one of the world's great cultures without being aware of the heritage of later centuries is a high-risk exercise. "Les Perses sassanides: Fastes d'un empire oublié (224- 642)," the alluring show of Iranian art on view at the Musée Cernuschi until Dec. 30, is not immune from the entertaining bloopers to which this can give rise.
Here, misnomers begin with the title. "The Sasanian Persians" is an unfortunate choice of words concerning a land that has called itself "Iran" (pronounced "Eran" in early times) for some 2,200 years. The real gem, though, is the subtitle "forgotten empire." Forgotten by whom?
The Sasanian past has been haunting the Iranian psyche ever since the last ruler, Yazdegerd III, was murdered in A.D. 651 or 652. Every history of Iran written in past centuries deals with it at length. Over one quarter of the 10th- century Shah-Nameh, the "Book of Kings," the most frequently copied work at Persian-speaking courts in Islamic times, sings the deeds of Sasanian emperors and allusions to these abound throughout the 1,000-year-old history of Persian literature.
In an era of globalization keen on international understanding, it might seem elementary for scholars studying the art of the Iranian past to have access to the language, Persian, in which a vast body of literature yields essential keys to its objects.
This, however, is not part of the Western academic tradition. The guest curator of the show, Françoise Demange of the Louvre, is a specialist in Ancient Greek art who does not read Persian, and most of the contributors to the exhibition book are likewise strangers to the living heritage of Iranian culture.
In keeping with time-honored Western tradition regarding pre-Islamic Iran, the objects are looked at as if they were the work of little green men just descended from outer space. Not a single Persian archaeological publication is cited. More surprisingly, Greek words are chosen when referring to objects that are named in Persian dictionaries and sung in poetry from the 11th century on.
One of the great masterpieces in the show on loan from the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington is thus referred to as a "rhyton." The silver vessel consists of a trumpet-shaped section curving abruptly to join up with the stylized head of an animal, perhaps an antelope or a bullock. Seen in profile, the vessel looks like a horn. And a drinking horn it is.
Regrettably, all literature dating from the Sasanian period when Pahlavi, the ancestor of Persian, was used, has vanished, barring a few religious texts. Failing that, early Persian literature ranging from a lexicon compiled in the mid-11th century to poetry of the same period, sheds light on wine horns. Called "palogh" or "shakh"/"shakh-e badeh," literally horn/wine horn, these featured prominently in wine banquets (as I wrote in the "Bulletin of the Asia Institute," the American journal of Iranian and Central Asian studies published in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan).
Another distinctive wine vessel represented in the show by a piece in the high tin alloy known in Persian as "white bronze" reproduced the shape of a boat used in shallow waters. As it happens, the type of embarkation appears in a scene on a silver dish on loan to the show from the National Museum of Iran, Tehran.
The object - called in Persian "kashti-e mey" (wine boat), or simply "kashti" (boat) - is mentioned in the earliest Persian literature describing wine libations at court. Countless verses remind us that the vessel was crescent shaped because it represented the new moon. Wine, on the other hand, symbolized liquid sunlight. When filled with the beverage, the crescent boat was seen as the new moon containing the orb of the sun. With it, the royal drinker held a symbol of the world.
Such concepts alien to Islam go back to the deepest past of Iran. They probably preceded Zoroastrianism, the religion preached by the prophet Zarathushtra, long before the first Iranian empire came into existence in 559 B.C.
However, as often happens with ancient customs, the wine libations ceremonial was taken over by Zoroastrianism. In a treatise, Omar Khayyam, better as a poet, describes the most important of all wine banquets held during the New Year (Nowruz) celebrations.
The head of the Zoroastrian priests would step forth in front of the king, holding up a gold cup filled with wine as he sung the ruler's praise. The scenes chased in low relief on the sides of a small silver bowl (also on loan from the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery) precisely represent such a Nowruz banquet. In one of five panels defined by the pillars of an arcade, a Zoroastrian priest walks toward a prince reclining on a low couch in the next panel. Holding a circular tray in one hand and a decanter in the other, the priest wears a mask to shield the wine cups on the tray from his breath. Near him, a sieve is stuck into the mouth of a jar laid on the ground. It filters the wine that has been fermenting and must be free from dregs. This is the final stage in the preparation of wine that took place at the time of the Nowruz. Nearby, a wine horn comes as close to the Sackler wine horn as the tiny scale permits.
In the panel on the left, a prince holds a wine cup in one hand and clutches with the other the myrtle crown handed to him by an attendant. In the panel on the right, a woman plucks a lute and a man beats the Iranian double drum - music was invariably performed at banquets. The two other panels enclose scenes associated with the New Year wine banquet in Persian literature. Two men play a game of backgammon; two wrestlers perform a stunt.
While one should exercise caution when using texts of a later period to decipher the meaning of earlier works, the conservative character of the Iranian literary tradition and the acute sense of the past that pervades Iranian culture give good reason to believe that the Persian texts are relevant.
They certainly yield a precise reading of some magnificent silk brocades characterized by a pattern of tangent roundels with frames enclosing beads. The type is represented in the show by a fragment recovered in the 19th century from a reliquary in a French abbey that preserved the relics of Saint Helen. The key to its identification is provided in the 11th-century dictionary mentioned earlier. Under the entries "parniyan" and "parand," the fabrics are characterized as "brocaded silks with motifs in roundels" - parniyan being polychrome and parand, monochrome.
Early Persian verses (some quoted in my monograph identifying parniyan and parand in volume 5 of the "Bulletin of the Asia Institute") supply details about the nature of the motifs and their meaning, the preferred colors, the uses to which they were put and the production centers.
These issues are not considered by the contributors, who focus in the main on dating problems. Dates, unfortunately, remain hypothetical because none of the silver vessels were found in archaeological sites duly surveyed. The majority were propelled on to the art market by the massive looting that has devastated Iranian sites for the last 80 years. Others turned up in Russia along the routes that led from Iran to the Baltic Sea or, going east, to the Ural mountains, and beyond.
In either case, dating is more akin to guesswork than to scientific deduction and varies from one publication to another. Location itself is the object of speculation.
Silver vessels that were said to come from Iran three decades ago because they were sold by Iranian dealers are suddenly given a qualified provenance. Hesitation even affects the dating of architectural fragments. Some surfaced on the art market robbed of their context. Others were recovered from excavations that yielded no conclusive data.
As visitors leave the show, some may retain a hazy impression of glittering splendor. But many will feel uncertain as to precisely what they were looking at. Where Sasanian art is concerned, science still has some way to go.
<http://www.bulletinasiainstitute.org/mira.htm> -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>