#WatercolorWednesday:
John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925)
Muddy Alligators, 1917
Watercolor over graphite on paper
H 34.3 cm (13.5 in) x W 52.1 cm (20.5 in)
#ManuscriptMonday:
Ambassadors of the Egyptian Sultan al-Nasir Faraj ibn Barquq Present their Gifts of Tribute, Including a #Giraffe, to Timur in 1404.
illustration from Zafarnama by Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdishiraz, 1436
Worcester Art Museum 1935.26
One more for #MosaicMonday:
House of the Rams' Heads Floor Mosaic Roman, Antioch late 400s - early 500s C.E. marble & limestone tesserae 76.2 × 208.3 cm (30 × 82 in.), 463 lb. [Worcester Art Museum 1936.33]
"This is one of four extant parts of an elaborate wide border that presumably framed a large central panel now lost (see Kondoleon catalogue, p. 134). The design is made up of the repeated motif of two confronted rams' heads (actually the foreparts or protomes of the rams) set on a pair of open wings with gray ribbons fluttering below. The ram's heads are mainly in shades of yellow, ranging from dark to light, with some white and flesh-colored tesserae as well; their horns are of light and dark gray, indicating striations, and the horns of every second pair of rams are outlined in black; they wear red collars. Red-pink roses with gray stems punctuate the spaces between the confronted rams' heads and again between the pairs.
Several features of the design have led scholars to connect this mosaic and a related pavement found on the upper level of the House of the Phoenix, also from Daphne and today in the Louvre (see Kondoleon catalogue p. 134, fig. 2) to Sasanian art (*1). The motifs of wings with a fluttering ribbon and ram protomes above wings, distinctive to Persian art, are found on the textiles, rock carvings, seals and metalwork of the Sasanian period (*2). The juxtaposition of the borders featuring rams' protomes and the two stucco pieces decorated with rams in WAM's Antioch exhibition (cat. Nos.21 and 22) reflects the close correspondence between the Antioch mosaics and Sasanian art, but the path of transmission remains unclear. Although the individual components of the border are distinctly Sasanian, their specific use is not. In Sasanian art the protome motifs appear either singly, as in the case of the Worcester pattern block, or in pairs rising from a shared base, though almost always facing outward, stressing their more abstract and ornamental aspect (*3). Can the confronted Antiochene version of the motif be an illustration of the innate naturalistic tendencies of Hellenistic-Roman art? Since there is evidence for the borrowing of Greco-Roman artistic vocabulary, especially in Sasanian metalwork, we might assume that Antiochene workshops had a reciprocal interest in Sasanian motifs. The two Daphne borders demonstrate such an interest. Undoubtedly, motifs and designs were carried through the exchange of portable arts, most likely coins, textiles, and metalwork."