The Brooklyn Museum collection includes twelve monumental alabaster reliefs from the Northwest Palac

The Brooklyn Museum collection includes twelve monumental alabaster reliefs from the Northwest Palace of Ashur-nasir-pal II (883 to 859 B.C.E.), King of Assyria. After nearly five decades on display in Brooklyn, six of the twelve reliefs were fully conserved in 2002. Now, through the generous support of Bank of America, conservators are treating the remaining six reliefs. Brooklyn Museum’s conservators have been documenting photographing, cleaning, and removing non-original materials with tools including a laser.The Brooklyn Museum is one of several museums and institutions with holdings of Assyrian palace reliefs; and, the Brooklyn Museum is not the only institution focusing on its Assyrian collections now. The British Museum’s upcoming exhibition “I am Ashurbanipal king of the world, king of Assyria” will present the museum’s Assyrian art, particularly their materials associated with King Ashurbanipal who reigned almost 200 years after Ashur-nasir-pal II. The exhibition will be on view at the British Museum from November 2018 through February 2019.In a collaboration between the Kurdish Regional Government’s representation in London and the UK Iraqi embassy, contemporary British artist Piers Secunda displayed shot works at the Iraqi ambassador’s residence in London earlier this Fall. In 2015, the Iraqi government announced that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIL, had purposefully destroyed much of the Northwest Palace site, part of a program of obliterating cultural heritage monuments in their original archaeological contexts. Made by taking impressions of historic casts of Assyrian reliefs and of contemporary damages to buildings in areas previously controlled or contested by ISIL, Secunda’s art represents, but does not recreate, damages inflicted on architectural elements including reliefs and lammasu at the Northwest Palace. And in a rare occurrence for the art market, a relief from the Northwest Palace, excavated by Sir Austen Henry Layard in the mid-19th century, will be offered at auction at the end of the month. American universities and institutions like the Virginia Theological Seminary often collected these reliefs at the time of their excavation, as Assyrian art was considered physical corroboration of biblical history and of particular interest for study because of that connection.Posted by Victoria SchusslerImage: Brooklyn Museum conservators aligning relief fragments. -- source link

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