Ashurbanipal Hunting Lions 

  At once groundbreaking and subversive, these ancient stone reliefs from the royal palaces of Nineveh teach us that, in great art, nothing is as it seems.

 What strikes the eye first are the arrows. Released by the Assyrian ruler Ashurbanipal in scene after sculpted scene, the arrows soar through the stony air of the work infallibly towards their ferocious target: a snarl of lions whose primal energy appears to threaten the very existence of the kingdom. The arrows, whether drawn back and frozen in their bows, already snapped, or forever piercing the flesh of their hopeless prey, accentuate the narrative thrust of the seventh-century BC reliefs that once adorned the royal palaces of ancient Nineveh, driving the action forward in time – a groundbreaking innovation in the history of image-making which many scholars trace back to these very sculptures.

The imagined trajectory of the arrows establishes a concurrent spectrum of past-and-present that enables Ashurbanipal simultaneously to appear charioted in one scene, while he rides horseback in another. In addition to the linearity of storyline for which the reliefs are admired, an exquisiteness of chiselled detail that captures the flex and flinch of the stricken animals proved revelatory in the unfolding story of art. ‘See!’, the twentieth-century American writer William Carlos Williams will exclaim in a poem that recalls the reliefs he had encountered as a young man in the British Museum, ‘Ashur-ban-i-pal / the archer-king on horse-back’. Williams cleverly uses hyphens to thin the Assyrian king’s name into the whizz of the soaring arrows, translating into the flow of writing the stasis of the ‘archerking’ we see, frozen in stone:

with drawn bow -- facing lions

standing on their hind legs,

fangs bared! his shafts

bristling in their necks!

Though the artist responsible for creating the reliefs is forgotten, there is little doubt that the surface message he intended is the vivid illustration of the remarkable physical prowess of Ashurbanipal, who alone could be trusted with protecting the kingdom. But locked behind the façade of every great work is an irony that invigorates and unsettles its ostensible meaning. In the case of the seventh-century BC lion hunt of Nineveh, the eye-hook through which crucial visual tension is unleashed is located just above the cage from which a lion is endlessly on the verge of being released. Easily overlooked amid the frozen orgy of violence is the small enclosure out from which a man can be seen leaning, gingerly lifting the door of the trapped beast’s corral.

However mighty Ashurbanipal may appear, in truth his machismo is a choreographed act controlled by the anonymous and half-concealed figure who manipulates the artificial threat-level of the work one manicured mane at a time. He’s the wizard behind the curtain to whom Ashurbanipal would rather we paid no attention. The partially obscured figure ensures that the king’s safety is never truly in jeopardy and that, in effect, he is shooting fish in a barrel. The lions that the ruler appears heroically to be hunting, thus protecting his kingdom from fearsome predators, were in fact captured beforehand by his minions and held in pens.

Ashurbanipal is said famously to have once roared, ‘I held the bow, caused the arrow to fly, the ornament of my prowess.’ What he didn’t say is that his legendary hunts weren’t hunts at all, but staged entertainment – a fact subversively exposed by the sculptor with this incriminating detail. Without the opening of the pen, there is no hunt and there are no arrows suspended in mid-flight forever sculpting the stone into legend. The relief is a farce whose deeper meaning complicates our first impressions. What it ultimately symbolizes is not the might of the king, but the power of art to encapsulate the complexities of life. The king may hold the bow, but the arrow of art always points in one direction: it’s the artist who pulls the strings.

More modern and meta than the year of its creation might suggest, the sculpted lion hunt of Nineveh presciently limbers our eyes for appreciating the elaborate textures of every work of art that will follow. Though there is no way of proving it, I imagine that the half-hidden figure with his hand on the lever of the relief’s pulse, who alone decides when to inject another surge of aesthetic electricity rippling through the veins of his relief, is a self-portrait of the artist himself, whose identity the whirring feathers of time have slowly erased.

Cai Guo-Qiang, Inopportune: Stage Two, 2004, detail of installation consisting of nine life-sized tiger replicas (papier-maché, plaster, fibreglass, resin and painted hide), arrows (brass, threaded bamboo shafts and feathers) and a mountain stage prop (Styrofoam, wood, canvas and acrylic paint: not shown) The brutal storytelling of contemporary Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s fierce Inopportune: Stage Two echoes the ingenious narrative arrows invented by the nameless, forgotten sculptor of ‘Ashurbanipal Hunting Lions’ twenty-six centuries earlier.

戴光荣翻译（2018年12月20日）：

这些来自尼尼微王宫的古代石刻浮雕，在我们面前展现其开创性和颠覆性的一面。这些浮雕无声地告诉我们：伟大的艺术，背后所蕴含的意义跟我们所看到的表面现象截然不同。

亚述王猎狮浮雕图

首先吸引观众眼球的是那些箭：它们由亚述王国统治者亚述巴尼拔射出，在不同的浮雕场景中，箭矢撕裂空气，无一例外地射向那些凶猛的目标。狮子的咆哮，其原始力量似乎威胁着亚述王国的存在。这些箭，无论是在弦上，还是搭在弓上，或已射出，或已刺穿那绝望猎物的肉体，无不凸显出公元前七世纪浮雕的叙事主题。这些浮雕曾装饰过古尼尼微的皇家宫殿，描绘了历史长河中的各类丰功伟绩，它们构成了图像制作史上的一项突破性创新，许多学者将这些创新归功于这些古老的浮雕。

艺术家们想象出来的箭矢的轨迹，刻画出过去与现在同现的光谱，让亚述王在不同的场景中，可以同时呈现不同形象：或驾驭亲征，或策马追猎。这些浮雕，除了让人欣赏线性故事情节之外，其精致的细节也为我们描绘了那些狮子的柔韧和退缩，给人无限启迪。“看！”，二十世纪美国作家威廉·卡洛斯·威廉姆斯在一首诗中惊叹，这首诗回忆起他年轻时在大英博物馆中见到亚述王猎狮浮雕，“亚述--巴--尼--拔/射手王--马背上”。威廉姆斯巧妙地使用连字符将亚述王的长串名字分解为飞逝的箭矢，将“射手王”系列动作转换成我们所见到的静态场景，永远凝固在石头上：

搭弓射箭向狮群

狮惊后翻又前仰

张牙舞爪咆哮上

箭插脖颈气血亡

尽管负责创作浮雕的艺术家被遗忘，但毫无疑问，其意图传达的表面信息生动地说明了亚述巴尼拔非凡的力量，只有国王才能够保护亚述王国。但每一部伟大作品的外表背后，都隐藏着一种反讽，这种反讽又动摇了它的外在表面意义。在公元前7世纪尼尼微王宫猎狮浮雕图中，释放出关键视觉张力的吸睛之处正好位于狮笼的上方，狮子正处于无休止地释放边缘。在凝固的暴力狂欢中，很容易忽视的是那个狮笼上方的小围栏，围栏里一个身影倾斜着身子，小心翼翼地抬起被困狮群的闸门。

不管亚述巴尼拔看起来有多么强大，事实上国王的英雄气概只不过是一种精心设计的行为表现，背后由半隐半现的人物操控，这个人可以控制危险级别，他才是英雄行为的导演。国王亚述巴尼拔倒希望我们不要去注意这个人。这个身份不明之人确保国王安全永远不会真正处于危险之中。实际上，国王所展现的不过是瓮中捉鳖的游戏。统治者看起来英勇狩猎狮子，从而保护他的王国免受可怕掠食者的伤害，事实上狮子是被他的奴仆事先捕获并圈养在围栏里的。

据说历史叙事中曾这样记载亚述巴尼拔的豪言壮语，“手握良弓，箭飞猎物，此乃本王力量之显现。”但是他没有说，所谓神奇的狩猎根本不是狩猎，而是上演的娱乐——雕刻家用一种有罪的细节颠覆性地揭露了这一事实。没有狮笼的打开，就没有狩猎，也没有箭悬浮在飞行途中，永远将石头雕刻成传说。猎狮浮雕图是一出闹剧，其深层含义使我们的第一印象复杂化。它最终象征的不是国王的力量，而是艺术的力量，以表现生活的复杂性。国王可以握住弓，但艺术之箭总是指向一个方向：真正掌控历史真相的永远是艺术家。

与其创作的年份相比，更现代、更超现实的是，尼尼微王宫的猎狮浮雕图有先见之明，它使我们的眼睛敏锐，可以欣赏到每件艺术品的精致纹理。虽然没办法证明这一点，但我想那个半隐半现的人物是艺术家自己的自画像，他手握浮雕脉搏的杠杆，独自决定何时在浮雕的脉络中注入另一股美学电波，而艺术家本人的身份随着时间的流逝而逐渐消失。