Far from incidental, the arresting piece of jewellery, which bursts from the borders of itself with piercing radiance like a celestial orb, transforms the static action from a callous chronicle of recurring cruelty, however impeccably wrought, to something more sympathetically mythic: a meditation on the interconnectedness of all things. In a scene of fierce and formidable action – of taut reins, raining arrows, and slanting spears – this seemingly innocuous decoration unexpectedly holds its own and manages to command our attention.
The piece of jewellery is so sharp and palpable in its sculptural description, one senses that the king might well, at any moment, drop his bow altogether, rip the earring loose, and fling it like a makeshift Ninja weapon at his feline foes. The ancient artist who designed the lion hunt reliefs has taken great care to articulate the shape and texture of the oversized earring that hangs from Ashurbanipal's left lobe in what historians call The Arrow Scene (one of four principal sculpted episodes that include The Lance Scene, The Dagger Scene and The Preparation Scene). The secret toilet humour in a Titian paintingĪnd then you see it, dangling conspicuously just below the ear of the king himself in one of the work's most dramatic scenes: a garish trinket as transfixing in its suggestive potential as the overblown gem that hovers beside the porcelain cheek of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring – that single decisive detail that unlocks the secret symbolism of this overpowering masterpiece. (A pair of panels revealing the carefully choreographed release of the creatures from cages puts paid to that propaganda, hinting that the reliefs are an archaic form of fake news.) Though there is little doubting the ferocious finesse of the forgotten artist responsible for this miracle of chisel and sweat, what our eyes long for is a hook or aperture amid the leonine bloodbath through which to glimpse the work's deeper meanings. What's it all about? It's certainly not what it at first purports to be, a celebration of the king's success in defeating an onslaught of lions in the wild. But beyond the surface narrative of majestic might conveyed by the exquisite sculptures, which portray the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal (now on horseback, now in a chariot) proudly slaughtering pride after pride of snarling lions, it might be difficult for any casual observer of the bas reliefs to discern any larger aesthetic or spiritual message from this brutal ballet of poised spears and frozen roars. At first glance, the 7th-Century BC gypsum panels, which once adorned the walls of a royal palace in Nineveh, Upper Mesopotamia, are a confusing chaos of arrows splitting muscle. Take, for example, the sprawling sculpted slabs of ancient alabaster known as the Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal.