'Empire' state

Assyria's brutal past is unearthed in a powerful exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts

''Protective spirit,'' created in 875{ndash}860 BC, shows the Assyrians' flair for linear stylization. (Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts)

For the rest of this year the Museum of Fine Arts will be the custodian of one of the most exquisite and evocative objects in all of art history. It is a small ivory carving of a lioness mauling a young man.

If it sounds gruesome, believe me, it's not - at least, not compared to some of the other works on display in the stunning exhibition "Art and Empire: Treasures From Assyria in the British Museum." Not far from our little ivory, for instance, you will see a speared lion vomiting blood, humans impaled on long poles, and no end of severed heads.

But the lioness mauling the young man has a very different feeling. It has an eerie quality of calm about it that put me in mind of Dr. Livingstone's description of being savaged by a lion in Africa: "It causes," he wrote, "a kind of dreaminess, in which there was no sense of pain nor feeling of terror. It was like what patients under chloroform describe who see all the operation but feel not the knife."

Stranger still is that this ivory plaque is not just serene: It is also erotic. Look at the way the lioness's left arm wraps itself around the man's shoulder; at the way her breast cleaves to his; and at the young man's pose, which could easily be interpreted as ecstatic surrender.

The carving's erotic effect is reinforced by the sumptuousness of its materials and the delicacy of its setting. The man, an African, is wearing a kilt covered in gold leaf, and the tight curls of his hair have gilt high lights. In the background is a delicate configuration of Egyptian lotus and papyrus flowers covered in gold leaf and inlaid with lapis lazuli and cornelian. The forehead of the lioness also supports a small disc of lapis lazuli.

Almost everything else in this show is about subordination and control. But this ivory plaque is more subtle and ambivalent. It has something frighteningly intimate about it, suggesting a sensuous unity of man and beast even as the one is in the process of being devoured by the other.

We may feel a similar, no less haunting and ambivalent sense of intimacy with the art and culture of ancient Assyria, to which this show provides a splendid introduction. I remember visiting the British Museum during the first days of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, disbelieving my eyes as they gazed upon carved reliefs showing prisoners being taken captive outside what is now Basra and enemy combatants hiding in reeds: Exactly the same scenes were being played out on the TV news at night.

Between the ninth and seventh centuries BC, the Assyrians created a vast empire stretching out from fabled cities like Nimrud, Nineveh, and Ashur on the Tigris, in present-day Iraq. Their civilization derived from Babylon and, in its imperial scope, it became the template for the mighty Persians and, later, the Romans and the British.

Despite mentions in the Bible and "The Histories" of Herodotus, virtually nothing was known about the Assyrians until the middle of the 19th century, when the great British archeologist Austen Henry Layard uncovered spectacular ruins from ancient palaces at Khorsabad (near present-day Mosul) and, most importantly, Nimrud in the 1840s and 1850s. Layard's discoveries, which included miles and miles of bas reliefs, carved from gypsum and made to adorn the mud brick walls of Assyrian palaces, generated great excitement back in Victorian Britain.

This show, from the holdings of the British Museum, comes to Boston after a world tour that has lasted (with brief interruptions) more than a decade. Much has happened in the intervening years, including the invasion of Iraq, which triggered large-scale looting of archeological sites in Iraq and the ransacking of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. The only other known version of the "The Lioness and the African," for instance, belonged to the Iraq Museum until it was stolen. It has not been returned.

These objects may be well traveled, but they have been freshly and dramatically installed by the MFA's curator, Lawrence M. Berman. The first room is set up to evoke a formal welcome to an Assyrian palace (although the objects are from different cities and different periods). A rare in-the-round statue of King Ashurnasirpal II is flanked by relief carvings of courtiers and then, farther back, soldiers and protective spirits.

Immediately, one marvels at the Assyrians' flair for linear stylization. The long hair favored by Assyrian men, the tight, repeating patterns of fabric, and the musculature of both animal and human figures are rendered crisply and with mesmerizing exactitude.

The second room, painted a pale, Prada-showroom green, uses two-sided glass display cases to show bowls, furniture fittings, and other fragments in ivory, bronze, stone, and glazed terracotta. Not only are we given glimpses into the sumptuousness of palace life, we note the internationalism of the Assyrian period. The bowls with Egyptian-style motifs or Phoenician designs seem as cosmopolitan as the carving of the lion and the young man, which was made for an Assyrian patron by a Phoenician craftsman, using materials from Central Asia and (probably) India.

It's not until the third room that we are treated to the brutal scenes of warfare and subjugation on massive stone panels that are so closely associated with Assyrian art, and that gave the Assyrians a reputation for remorseless brutality.

Whether or not one has a taste for depictions of violence (and I must admit, the schoolboy in me thrills to these carvings), there's no denying the originality of these works. In fact, they constitute the first true narrative art, for here, the Assyrians devised ways of showing how one incident led to the next. Effectively, they were the first cartoon strips.

A great example comes in the show's final room, where a large panel divided into three horizontal strips shows, from right to left along the top strip, a crouching male lion emerging from a cage, a lion being struck by an arrow as it prepares to leap, and a lion being struck by a shield in midair, its body fully extended. It's obvious that we are supposed to read the three lions as one, at different moments in the sequence.

One idea about what prompted the Assyrians' invention of narrative art is that continuous warfare with neighbors quickened and clarified their awareness of time and space. Sure enough, among the carved panels are some tremendous battle sequences. The most dazzling, and at first bewildering, is known as the Battle of Til-Tuba. It shows a scene of absolute pandemonium: bodies, weapons, and severed heads everywhere.

The scenes do not proceed by linear sequence, nor are they divided into boxes like modern cartoons. But with the help of a nearby diagram we can unravel an entire story revolving around the capture and beheading of an Elamite king and his son.

Other sections of the show demonstrate the extensive learning and literature preserved by Assyria's kings (as well as their obsessive record-keeping), and the role of the gods and magic. A fascinating side room illustrates aspects of the rediscovery of Assyrian art and culture in the 19th century.

But it's lions, once again, that capture the imagination toward the end of the show. Mesopotamian lions, which are now extinct, were smaller than African lions, but they remained formidable. To Assyrians they represented the chaos of nature. It was the king's responsibility to protect his people from them - hence the symbolic importance of the lion hunt (not really a hunt at all; more like a carefully stage-managed slaughter).

In the relief called "Royal Lion Hunt," made between 875 and 860 BC, you notice the rhythmic linear outlines of the horses and charioteers, and the stylized rendering of the wounded lion. Its clenched sinews and snarling jowls have been transformed into something resembling a diagram.

If you compare it to the famous panel made more than 200 years later called "The Dying Lion," you notice a much more naturalistic style of rendering. The lion, vomiting blood, strains all of its muscles in an attempt to stay upright, and its claws grip the ground. It's a truly terrible image.

The Assyrian empire collapsed before its artists took this kind of naturalism any further. Somehow, knowing this makes the image of this dying, agonized lion seem all the more poignant.

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com.