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Is this Sasanian

Started by aligern, September 15, 2012, 10:14:39 AM

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aligern

Tom, put up a few Roman silver plates that you think match?    Is it possible to identify the Sasanian king?  Is it possible that an artist rendered the falling rider as a Roman in a Roman style and the Persian in a more Persian style ??

The arrow in the fallen horse looks just like the arrows in the lions on the Assyrian lion hunt in the BM.  Are other Sasanian fallen horses/wounded animals represented with the arrowhead thus?

If its a forgery and the artist has copied a Sasanian rock relief then what has he copied for the falling horse/rider??
It would be conclusive if we could come up with another  genuine item of art that had the fallen horse/ rider from a different context.
Roy

Duncan Head

Quote from: aligern on September 20, 2012, 09:49:33 AMIf its a forgery and the artist has copied a Sasanian rock relief then what has he copied for the falling horse/rider??
It would be conclusive if we could come up with another  genuine item of art that had the fallen horse/ rider from a different context.
At first I wondered if it was http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Images2/Misc/mode_07.jpg who'd been given the equipment of the Parthians at Firuzabad, but although there are similarities in the pose it's not close enough to be a direct copy.
Duncan Head

Duncan Head

Reviving this thread from the dead - Roy asked about this supposedly Sasanian plate, I queried whether it was a forgery; now I've found a paper which suggests precisely that it is a modern work - though perhaps not a "fake" as such. By Patryk Skupniewicz, who has a few articles at academia.edu about Sasanian armament.

QuoteTabriz Museum plate with the depiction of the mounted combat under discussion presents only superficial relations with Sasanian combat depictions, limited to some iconographic details which are assembled in an order unprecedented in Sasanian art. Compositionally the plate does not match any of the known Sasanian formulae. Neither the position of the combatants nor of their mounts corresponds to the known Sasanian examples. The pieces of Sasanian style are gathered in a way foreign to Sasanian aesthetics showing the knowledge of the corpus of Sasanian art but different visual language. The dynamism of the composition emphasizing the effort of the victorious personage can be related only to Kushano-Sasanian plates, but even then the crowned head is shown upright in comparison to the torso. The discrepancies between the discussed piece and the known objects of Sasanian art are too vast to believe that it could represent an unknown school of Sasanian toreutics. It is also difficult to believe that it was manufactured with an intention of forgery, i.e. selling the product under the label of originality. The forger would most likely choose a more common subject and hold to the confirmed stylistic and compositional principles. Most likely the plate was manufactured in late 1920s or 1930s in the time when Iranian national awareness received influence from the modern archaeological research. It is likely that the object was addressed to the Iranians educated in a European manner, who took pride in their past, hence exact quotations from Sasanian art and rather modern general expression.

http://izd.pskgu.ru/projects/pgu/storage/metami/metami06/metami06-11.pdf
or
https://www.academia.edu/19610407/TABRIZ_MUSEUM_BATTLE_DISH._FORMAL_CONSIDERATIONS
Duncan Head