Winged Bull Between Two Floral Friezes
Unknown · Reign of Darius I, 522-486 BC
A bull with great feathered wings walks to the right, its horns curving forward and its body glazed in soft tones against a deep blue ground. Two ornamental bands frame the animal: one of palmettes and one of rosettes, whose separate inventory numbers show that the panel was reconstructed from three neighbouring elements. The relief is shallow, but the moulding picks out each feather of the wings and the curls of the mane along the neck. Compare the stylised muscles on the leg with those of the lions, and notice how the hooves are set precisely on the rosette band as though on a floor.
Winged bulls guarded gateways across Mesopotamia, from the Assyrian palaces to the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, and Darius the First took the motif for his own palace at Susa. This panel stood north of the eastern courtyard of the Apadana. It entered the Louvre through the sharing of finds from the French excavations at Susa in the early twentieth century, a later phase of work than the Dieulafoy discoveries that produced the friezes of archers and lions.
Did You Know? The bricks of this panel are only six centimetres thick, which suggests they were a facing applied to the wall rather than part of its structure.
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