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274 Books Arrest and Movement: An Essay on Space and Time in the Representational Art of the Ancient Near East. H. A. Groenewegen-Frankfort. 1951 edition reprint. Hacker Art Books, New York, 1972. 222 pp., illus. $25.00. Reviewed by Gerhard Charles Rump* This book is a reprint of the 1951 edition and it is indeed questionable whether it should have been published 22 years after the original edition without taking into consideration the many and successful methods of investigation that have developed since then. Still, the study of its contents may well be useful, both for a deeper understanding of the ancient art of the Near East and the general problems of representational space and time. Especially the rendering of space in Near Eastern art appears very eccentric to the Western eye, moreover it even varies regionally and the different ways ‘are, in fact, essential to the character of each style’ (p. XXIII). The different renderings constitute independent systems that can by no means be explained by simply assuming a lack of knowledge of perspective or the hypothetical respect of the artist ‘for the two-dimensional character of the surface’ (p. XXIII). But different as the single styles may be, they all share a common problem of rendering space and time and the problem of monumentality, which is also dealt with in the study. The fundamental pioblems that were solved in different ways are: Space and Corporeality, Time and the Distinction Animate-Inanimate and Coherence and Contingency. The different solutions to these fundamental problems are analysed as they appeared in the art of Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamian and Assyrian art and in the art of Crete. Each section is arranged more or less chronologically. The author explains that representation and design in ancient Egyptian art developed from the protohistoric (predynastic) disregard of spatial orientation of forms merely ‘set off against chaos’ (p. 15) into the avoidance of all rendering of illusionary space and the rigid adherence to the use of a ground line and the nonfunctional drawing of human figures. This kind of representation does not ‘demand an imaginative response in a temporal or a spatial sense’ (p. 38), it is a case of non-actuality where in the rendering of a scene the scene is only ‘a stage of a typical act, not a phase of a significant occurrence’ (p. 38). Later in the Old Kingdom and in the First Intermediate Period the form disintegrated. In the Middle Kingdom there was a new trend towards monumentality. Certain elements in pictures and reliefs, such as architectural features, emphasize that the action depicted ‘took place in a certain setting and that therefore a concrete, rather than a typical, event was intended’ (p. 77). The rendering of space, however, was not affected. The New Kingdom witnessed the introduction of new concepts in the classical scheme of decoration and aspects of time were introduced by gestures, grouping, shift of axis and head-tilting, together with the ‘effort to represent actuality as a pregnant moment rather than as a mere contingency’ (p. 93). The changes were so great that the author calls the art of the period the ‘Amarna Revolution’ (p. 96), which is seen as the triumph of actuality. Mesopotamian (and Assyrian) art, which has a ‘startling lack of stylistic coherence and continuity’ (p. 145), does still show the continuous development of solutions to the problems of representational space and time. In its earliest forms (Susa) the repertoire of human and animal figuresis rather limited but ‘there exists an intimate correlation between figure and design’ (p. 146). The rendering of movement appears in the grouping of the figures and their relative directional impetus, which itself has very complicated relations to the decorative design, where for instance the form of a circular band can be responsible for the returning of the movement of figures to itself. But later there developed commemorative reliefs of narrative character, together with a ‘vigorous naturalism’ (p. 170) *D463 Bochum-Querenburg, Hustadtring 139, Postfach 520512, Fed. Rep. Ger. in the rendering, which even has the effect of making certain groups of figures more contingent (rather than heraldic). Especially in Assyria, also some spatial coherence of figures and objects developed, as...

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