museum

875 Words2 Pages

The art piece I observed was The Assyrian Lion Hunt wall panels. The Assyrian Lion Hunt wall panel is composed of gypsum and the technique used to create these wall pieces was relief. The wall panel dates back from 612B all the way to 880BC, which is the Neo-Assyrian time period (The British Museum). The wall panel was excavated from Koutunjik, located in North Iraq in the North Palace. The wall panel I chose to observe closely was during the period of the Egyptian ruler Ashurbanipal (The British Museum). This piece is currently located in the British Museum and was acquired in 1856 (The British Museum). The wall panels can be found in the Middle East department
What drew me into The Assyrian Lion Hunt wall panel were the giant sculptures outside the entrance to the wall panels. The giant sculptures were a part of the Khorabad The Palace of Sargon room. There sculptures were large and the entrance was dimmed in light, which made me want to walk deeper past the entrance. However, once I past the entrance, and found the piece I decided to observe for this paper, I felt displeased. The walls behind the wall panels were a light powder blue. This was not aesthetically pleasing. I knew I was in the Egyptian part of the museum and the entrance made me feel as though I was entering a tomb but when I walked in my first thought was how someone could possibility think powder blue walls could fit in such a room. I expected to walk into a dim lit room that would bring the visitor back to this time period. Not only were there powder blue walls but also the floors were tiled and off white. This backdrop completely ruined the feeling for me. I wanted to walk past that dim light entrance with overwhelmingly giant statues to a dim room with ston...

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... were leading me to believe they were only carving and that there was zero color every located on these panels.
I believed the current display has changed the conditions of how this specific palace, where the wall panels were found, looked and therefore hinders the ability of the visitor to understand the meaning and role of the wall panels. If I were the museum curator I would improve this room by designing the room to look like the original palace, decorated with Assurbanipal’s military campaigns and also with military subjects. This could be accomplished with the use of artist renderings if the real objects cannot be found or brought to the museum. I would have also hung detailed art rendering pictures next to the wall panels of what they may have looked like with paint or varnish to give the visitor an idea of what these wall panels could have looked like.

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