Christians of Iraq
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Christians of Iraq
Contact Links Comments & Feedback Historical articles Historical pictures Photos of Bombed Churches Home Only this link has access to all News articles
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Exiled in a Museum, the Dream of Peace By ROGER COHEN.
February 25th, 2006
PARIS, France - There is much to admire and puzzle over in the remarkable Ingres exhibition that has just opened at the Louvre, not least the odd mixture of punctilious observation and languorous reverie in his famous nudes. Charles Baudelaire, an admirer, called the French artist "bizarre."
The poet had a point. Among the stranger works is a portrait of the Emperor Napoleon, dated 1806. Pale as Hamlet before his father's ghost, his face set in implacable determination, Napoleon is swathed - swamped almost - in the regalia of the God-like power he has created for himself.
Every accouterment accentuates an air of sumptuous omnipotence: the ermine robes, the crown of gilded laurel, the finely-worked golden throne, the scepter in the emperor's right hand and the sword of Charlemagne propped against his left leg. Here, it seems, authority has acquired an absolute serenity in the man who will foist French enlightenment on the world.
And yet - is it Napoleon's little embroidered shoe planted on a too-elevated footrest or the extravagant tracery of his lace collar? - a faint air of mockery hovers in the painting.
It seems that, beyond the formality of the portrait, Jean-Dominique Ingres is also whispering: here you see him, a Corsican upstart, a small fellow clothed in extravagant illusions, a soldier of revolution now a prisoner of his pompous power, a man deluded, like so many before him, into thinking his authority is immortal.
Within 15 years, Napoleon would die, defeated and alone and in exile on the remote British island of Saint Helena. Gazing at the painting, I could not help thinking of the bitter end that so soon awaited such a god among men, of the transience of things in general, and of another museum in another place now gripped by the kind of upheaval of which the emperor was so energetic an agent.
Napoleon never reached Baghdad. But in his invasion of Egypt and expedition into the Ottoman province of Syria, he probed the weaknesses of an Ottoman Empire whose collapse a little more than a century later would lead to the creation of the modern state of Iraq. On his Middle Eastern campaigns, he brought with him a large team of scientists charged with archaeological investigation.
No such concern, or curiosity, about a rich past was immediately apparent among the American forces that reached Baghdad in April 2003. As a result, the Iraq Museum, a chief repository of the treasures of millennia of civilization in the place where civilization first acquired meaning, was plundered. Thousands of artifacts - gems and figurines, tablets and vessels, statues and bas-reliefs - were stolen.
It was in the now partly reconstituted rooms of the closed museum that I found Donny George a few weeks ago. A small man with glittering brown eyes, George, an archaeologist, is director general of the museum.
Ingres famously had his violin; George's hobby is playing drums in a rock band. Under Saddam Hussein he was a member of a band called 99 Percent - "of perfection," he explained - that specialized in Deep Purple songs. That remains one of the minor unwritten chapters of the ousted dictatorship.
Now, as violence rages around him, George waits. He is an exile within his own museum, condemned to contemplate his own and his country's fate in rooms emptied of visitors. Not quite Saint Helena, the closed museum is nevertheless an isolated echo chamber of turmoil and memory.
George paces the museum, which has recovered most of what was stolen, and dreams. "I have in my imagination the reopening ceremony, with all the people who have helped us," he says. "There will be 1,000 people in the gardens, musicians playing traditional Iraqi music, a huge feast."
He points to a vast courtyard where date palms and other trees are being planted. In his mind's eye he has already placed the banquet-laden tables, the musicians, the dancers, the guests.
All that is missing is peace. As George observes, "When a museum is reopened, it means that peace has come." The Interior Ministry has been urging him to open the museum, saying it will provide him with more than 1,000 guards if necessary. "But then it's no longer a museum," George says, "it's a barracks."
An Iraqi Christian, George is deeply troubled by the sectarian violence that has gathered in intensity since the American invasion. Keep religion out of politics, he urges; render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, unto God what is God's.
I know that the killing and mayhem that have followed the destruction of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, a revered Shiite shrine, will have caused him great despondency. Beauty, he holds, is worth more than politics, and violence should be a stranger to every God.
George is a patient man because he is steeped in his country's history. "There are stages such as these and then there are stages of calm," he says with his gentle smile. "Each can last 100 years, but it passes. A famous Samarian writer described the scene here in 2000 B.C., saying that people are looting and killing and nobody knows who the king is. So you see, nothing is new."
We strolled through the extraordinary Assyrian Hall, which survived the looting and is filled with monumental reliefs of exquisite beauty representing the summit of Mesopotamian art. A prominent presence on the panels is the winged bull, seen as a protective spirit that guarded Assyrian palaces and cities.
The body of the bull represents the strength of the most powerful earthly creature; the wings of the eagle represent the magnificence of flight; the head of a man represents the wisdom of enlightened power. Eight centuries before the dawn of the Christian era, here is another representation of a God-like power.
In time, of course, the Babylonians would sweep away the Assyrians as comprehensively as the Russian campaign and later Wellington would sweep away Napoleon. That, in the end, is what Ingres is saying in his bizarre way: everything passes and nothing is quite what it seems.