Horse Figures in Ancient Art

Paper Summary:

This paper describes and compares two works of art to show how two ancient cultures, China and Afghanistan, created small, personalized horse-figures to express the importance of horses in their world. The figures compared are ?Quadruped with Bowl and Three Cockerels?, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, from the Second Century, and a Chinese tomb sculpture made between 25 and 220 A.D, also found in the LACMA. The paper includes pictures of the two pieces.

From the Paper:

"The Chinese horse is also stylized, its pose exaggerated. But unlike the Afghan piece, it shows no humor, and no real movement, despite the fact that its more realistic legs seem to be posed to indicate actual movement; the Afghan figure's legs are four-square and still, it seems more active than the Chinese figure. This may be a function of the function of each piece. The Afghan figure was made for an apparently ritualistic purpose, and possibly not a totally serious one because of the humor shown in the abstraction, the gesture and the mixture of geometric and curvilinear forms."

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