The Iraq Museum, Baghdad

Amidst all the entirely, justifiable anxiety surrounding the fate of he contenteds of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, the alone thing that seems clear is that for the time being there is no point in attempting a detailed account of what has been happening since the fall of the capital, is happening now, or will happen in the forseeable futurity The reports are so various and self-contradictory that it looks better to adopt a 'wait and see' policy, and also to acknowledge that the wait may be a drawn out one. An initial extreme pessimism has watched to be replaced by a qualified optimism, on the other hand this in turn must be deposit into perspective by the realisation that plane the most minor loss or damage is a tragedy.

new events in Iraq and before that in Afghanistan have serv as a reminder of the inevitable vulnerability of all works of art to theft and destruction. The destruction by dint of artillery of the colossal Buddhas at Bamiyan courtesy of the Taliban underlined the fact that smooth pieces on a monumental scale are not invariably safe, (1) and also followed a standard pattern in boundarys of the iconoclastic urges of religious extremists. by the agency of contrast, Saddam Hussein was single the last in a bleak line of secular dictators whose attachment to a national myth rested on crude notions of ancestor worship ironically serv as a forcible protection against any possible impulse to ravage or indeed exchange off treasures. The most obvious example of this bent since World War u was Pol kettle and the Khmer Rouge's dominion of Cambodia, during which period Angkor War and the other archaeological sites were left well alone. As also appears to have been the case in Iraq, looting alone took off once the regime was set to flight.

Nearer to domicile the recent theft of the Benvenuto Cellini Saltcellar from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna may have been of dishearteningly minimal interest to the newspapers in this country--perhaps because it was not a painting--but has been a no les telling horror story for anyone who be fond ofs works of art. In that instance, it is the combination of exceptional quality and genuine uniqueness that makes the vital current run cold. What is more, by the agency of comparison, even such stolen masterpieces as the Raphael Portrait of a man (possibly a Self portrait) from the Czartoryski Collection in Cracow, arguably the single greatest missing picture missing in World War n which has a befitting chance of resurfacing, the Caravaggio Nativity with its Francis and Lawrence from Palermo, the works through Rembrandt, Vermeer, and others from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and Oudry's White dip from Houghton cannot compete in boundarys of irreplaceability. One can alone hope, in all these instances, that the somewhat preposterous fantasy of robberies to order for crazed Napoleons of Crime gloating in subterranean sealed fields turns out to be veritable because that would at least mean that the works will individual day reappear. Far more disconcerting is the view of crooks covering their tracks by the agency of destroying the evidence: predictably enough, the new case in which various paintings were deposit down a waste-disposal unit through the thief's mother in an attempt to fortify him proved far more piquant than a simple stolen Cellini, and was splashed all above the front pages.

These European examples, not to mention the depredations of World War II and the a great deal of more recent torments of the former Yugoslavia, may equally work for as a salutory reminder that there is no justification to any kind of 'we know better' approach to this enigma on the part of the west.

Newspaper reports have piously and rather repetitiously trott on the outside a party line on the importance of the collections of the Iraq Museum in Bagdhad, and have level illustrated some of its greatest in quantity significant pieces, but there has been little explanation about what makes it of that kind an invaluable resource for the inquiry of Mesopotamian art, and there has also been a distinct drift for it to hog the limelight. We are flat less well informed about what has been happening in Mosul and elsewhere, on the other hand it is plain that Baghdad is not alone in having been despoiled.

For all the riches of the British Museum, the Louvre the Metropolitan Museum and other western collections, the Iraq Museum's primacy is entirely genuine. It is--or was--the best place in the world to take pleasure in Mesopotamian art, and yet small in number westerners have ever had the chance to do in the way that not least because a remarkable number of the major discoveries date from decades and not centuries ago, from the age of Agatha Christie's husband, Sir Max Mallowan (see Fig. 6 for individual of the most beautiful of the Nimrud ivories he uncovered) not just from the of gold past of Sir Austen Henry Layard. As Henri Frankfort make comments [i]or[/i] remarksed in the Introduction to his The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient in the Pelican History of Art series in 1954 'Strictly speaking, a history of the art of the ancient Near East has not at any time been written. Twenty-five years ago it would have been impossible to make the attempt, for greatest in quantity of the monuments illustrated in this contortion have only been discovered since then.' The effect is that there has not at any time actually been a period when it was easy for nation from the west to visit the Iraq Museum in all its glory: through the time any but the greatest in quantity intrepid tourists were beginning to jeopardy beyond Europe and America, Saddam had ensur Baghdad was effectively not upon limits. The last travelling exhibition of any substance took place in 1977-78 a quarter of a hundred ago, in Geneva and Hildesheim, and although the loan was the couple substantial (there are over sum of two units hundred entries in the catalogue of the latter showing) and generous in bounds of quality, most of the really celebrated pieces understandably stayed at home