Inventing Assyria: exoticism and reception in nineteenth-century England and France

First, there is the question of continuity with the images created by Martin and Delacroix before the discoveries. Neither artist produced anything directly related to the newly visible Assyrian art. Martin died in 1854, one year after the British Museum formally completed its Assyrian galleries. Delacroix lived considerably longer, and even remarked on the extraordinary treatment of animals in Assyrian works.(72) Yet he never revised the imagery of The Death of Sardanapalus or otherwise directly used the visual evidence of Assyria. The most telling evidence of Delacroix's relation to actual Assyrian art is a brief notation in his journal from 1858 making clear that it is not Delacroix himself but rather a relative who was "quite struck" with Assyrian art.(73)

Delacroix's stance toward Assyria exemplifies the nature of its artistic reception in midcentury France and follows the same pattern as the passage from L'Illustration. Assyria is tacitly acknowledged, but it is also withheld from concerted artistic consideration. This process, strictly controlling and even manufacturing Assyria to the requirements of the audience, accounts for the best-known and longest-lived visual reference to Assyria in nineteenth-century France, the "Assyrian" profile.

The pose in profile, with a thick beard jutting directly downward from the chin, was claimed perhaps most famously by Gustave Courbet, as in his description of himself at the center of his 1855 Painter's Studio as "myself painting showing the Assyrian profile of my head."(74) Many of Courbet's paintings of the 1850s show him from a similar angle [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED]. Contemporary caricatures also delighted in exaggerating this feature.(75) Much of Assyrian art consists of profile reliefs, and protruding beards are a common characteristic [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 3, 9, 11 OMITTED]. These contemporary allusions, however, made no attempt to emulate the specific knotting and shaping of Assyrian beards, and Courbet's facial features are not directly comparable to the stylized Assyrian features.(76)

Courbet's "Assyrian" profile, that is, does not indicate a deep interest in Assyrian art. It would hardly be identifiable as Assyrian on its own. Rather, Assyria offers an occasion for the artist's self-assertion. Courbet almost flaunts his lack of concern with the specifics of ancient art, in a manner consistent with his subsumption of all past art to his contemporary concerns.(77)

Courbet's "Assyrian" profile is a casual, even whimsical gesture of self-fashioning, barely acknowledging the actuality of Assyrian art. Yet its offhandedness, its actual neutralization of the particularity of Assyrian art, should be taken seriously as a means of popularizing Assyria. The Assyrian beard achieved a currency of its own in French visual culture, covering over much of the inherited image of ancient Assyria.

Thus, Celestin Nanteuil's poster for the 1867 opera Sardanapale by Henri Becque and Victorin Joncieres [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 5, 6 OMITTED] revisited Delacroix's subject without making the slightest use of the repertory of Assyrian objects now available in the Louvre. The world of Sardanapalus was recreated instead with specifically Egyptian features, such as curved architraves, swelling "lotus" capitals, and even hieroglyphics (in the lower left corner). The cache of pots before the king are, like his costume, of classical form. Most prominent among them is a Greek amphora. The king's conspicuous "Assyrian" beard sanctions this heterogeneous assembly.