brooklynmuseum:The Brooklyn Museum collection includes twelve monumental alabaster reliefs from the
brooklynmuseum: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. Ashur-nasir-pal II chose to build his palace in the city of Kalhu, also known as Nimrud, along the Tigris river, now in Iraq’s Nineveh Province. Almost three thousand years later, long after Ashur-nasir-pal II’s reign and the fall of the Assyrian empire, Sir Austen Henry Layard, a British archaeologist, rediscovered the palace in 1840 and began excavation with British funding in 1846. Reliefs were excavated from the palace rooms, cut to reduce the weight of each massive piece of stone, packed, and transported. Many arrived in London and remain at The British Museum. In 1852, Henry Stevens, an American art dealer working in London, acquired twelve reliefs from The British Museum. The reliefs were shipped to Boston, where they were displayed until 1858 when James Lenox purchased them for The New York Historical Society. When The Society’s collecting mandate changed in the late 1930s, the reliefs were placed on indefinite loan at the Brooklyn Museum until 1955 when Hagop Kevorkian donated funds allowing Brooklyn to purchase the reliefs.An historic image of relief 55.155, possibly from the New York Historical society in the late 1930s. The image may be of a photographic negative as the relief itself appears inverted.Since their arrival at Brooklyn in the late 1930s, the reliefs have been on display in various galleries throughout the Museum. Moving these large pieces of stone always presents a challenge, as the reliefs weigh between 1900 lbs. and 4500 lbs. each and many are broken into multiple fragments. When the reliefs were installed in the Kevorkian Galleries, their current location, the fragments were assembled with dowels and plastered to the wall.The reliefs during the 2002 treatment.After nearly five decades on display, six of the twelve reliefs were fully conserved in 2002. Each relief was photographed, documented, cleaned, structurally stabilized, furnished with a secure mounting system, and reinstalled. Now, through the generous support of Bank of America, Brooklyn Museum’s conservators will fully treat the remaining six reliefs over the next two years.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. This type of violence makes urgent the need to support cultural heritage preservation and unfortunately timely the conservation of these Assyrian reliefs, which have endured, and will endure.Posted by Victoria Schussler -- source link