Art is a form of human activity that aims at reflecting the beauty of the surrounding world. However, ancient art (30,000 BCE- 500 CE) was also directed at expressing human religious beliefs and events of the real world. This paper will focus on the comparative analysis of the two pieces of ancient art in respect of their artistic meaning, means of production, and the historical context of their creation.
So, the first piece of art represents the culture of Ancient Egypt. It was accessed at the website of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The culture of ancient Egypt can be characterized by great attention paid to religious issues, and the piece under consideration is a bright example of this fact. It is the Statuette of the god Anubis, belonging to the Ptolemaic Period, 304-30 B.C. The Statuette is created from wood using pieces of gesso and paint, and its height amounts to 16 ½ inches. The materials used are characteristic of Egyptian art, and the almost perfect quality of the paint and gesso elements on the piece proves the skills with which the unknown author created this work. The meaning of the piece is evident from its background – Anubis is the guardian of the dead in the afterlife and of their mummies in this world. This statue was created as a part of a burial aimed at protecting the tomb of a respectable Egyptian person (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009).
As contrasted to the Anubis statuette, the second piece under analysis is a memorial of a real-world person. It is the Statue of a Sumerian Prince belonging to the ancient art of Babylon. It is approximately referred to as the Neo-Sumerian period (late 3rd millennium B.C.). It is created of diorite, which was a traditional material for the region of the Near East. The height of the piece is 70 cm. Drawing from the peculiarities of the Sumerian culture, the statue depicts a prince as Sumerians believed in the supreme role of monarchs in their social and religious lives. The symbolism of the statue lies in the fact that the royal power was viewed as a divine gift and was considered to be the primary topic for arts. All other pieces of Sumerian and Babylonian art of the ancient period are dedicated to either social or political events, including the stones with the Code of Hammurabi, bas-reliefs depicting the battles of the Babylonian armies with their rivals, etc. Accordingly, this piece of art reflects the epoch of its creation by being dedicated to the real-life topic rather than to religious motives that would become dominant after the Persian conquest of Babylon (The Louvre Museum, 2009).
To conclude, the pieces of art under analysis represented different ancient cultures and were created in different epochs. The earlier Babylonian statue reflects the social trends of the Neo-Sumerian period, while the Anubis statuette is the manifestation of the religiosity of the Egyptian culture of the Ptolemaic Period. The materials used and symbolic meanings of the pieces are different, but both reflect the reality of the epochs of their creation.
References
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (2009). Ancient Egypt. Web.
The Louvre Museum. (2009). Babylon Art. Web.
FS/g. (2009). The Smithsonian Institution Freer Gallery and Sackler Gallery. Web.