“Surrealism”

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Introduction

The strong realistic trend in Urkesh glyptics, with images rendering figures and scenes as they are seen in reality, may be linked to another distinctive stylistic trait. In some cases, certain features are emphasized in a way that seems to distort reality.

In fact, what happens is that the detail appears as if extracted from its context and enlarged to give it more prominence. I would like to see in this not so much a distortion as rather a way to foreground a given detail.

“Surrealism” is thus be understood as “hyper-realism”: the fact that a given trait in a figure is given a special status means that it emerges even more realistically than the rest of the figure. There are as if two levels at which reality is shown, one relating to an overall figuire, the other to a detail of the same figure, which is accentuated in its rendering.

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Zooming in

The procedure may be seen as the equivalent of the zooming in function that is available for our digital images. Thus if the bull in A5.137 were rendered with a normal eye, we would then see the eye much enlarged when zooming in on the image.
The procedure used by the seal cutter is to enlarge the eye within its original context, setting it within a wider frame. Given the otherwise careful naturalistic rendering of the scene, the "unnaturalistic" rendering of the eye highights it as a feature that calls for a special attention.

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Stylistic traits

In the following sections I discuss in detail five “surrealistic” stylstic traits. They belong in two groups.

The first includes traits that refer to formal details: the deep fringe along the edges of a surface, and the pointed edge of any given detail in a particular figure.

The second incudes different treatments in the rendering of a given anatomical feature, namely the eye and the head as a whole.

unusual motifs

add extended arm?

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Some parallels

We may compare these stylistic traits with analogous motifs found in modern paintings. The term “surrealism” applies here in the original sense of being “beyond” realism, and this is marked by the overall distortion of the natural sequence. So the overall aim of the stylistic procedure is quite different, but the impact of the details is remarkably similar, as the following comparisons will show.

dotted eye		AKc3		Portrait of Dora Maar
extended arm see also A5.137 A7.246 A7c3 A7c4 AKc2 AKc103 J6q462.3		AKc4		Woman seated in armchair