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Zainab Bahrani s The Infinite Image is at once a massively important contribution to the study of ancient Mesopotamian art and a brilliant intervention into the history and theory of art and aesthetics. It decisively overturns the deeply entrenched cliches that regard art as a uniquely western European invention. But it also mobilizes a rich array of textual sources to reconstruct the whole discourse around images and their cultural lives in the ancient world, a discourse that will strike many readers as having an uncanny timeliness in the era of the pictorial turn. Magnificently illustrated with images from the ancient, classical, and modern worlds, this book will be essential reading for scholars of art history, visual culture, aesthetics, and iconology. --W. J. T. Mitchell, author of Seeing Through Race

Zainab Bahrani's The Infinite Image is at once a massively important contribution to the study of ancient Mesopotamian art and a brilliant intervention into the history and theory of art and aesthetics. It decisively overturns the deeply entrenched cliches that regard art as a uniquely western European invention. But it also mobilizes a rich array of textual sources to reconstruct the whole discourse around images and their cultural lives in the ancient world, a discourse that will strike many readers as having an uncanny timeliness in the era of the pictorial turn. Magnificently illustrated with images from the ancient, classical, and modern worlds, this book will be essential reading for scholars of art history, visual culture, aesthetics, and iconology. --W. J. T. Mitchell, author of Seeing Through Race

This is a vibrant account of ancient Mesopotamian art, new, contemporary, compelling. It is informed by the long history of the influence of Sumerian visual culture from its collection by Greek satraps in the Hellenistic age to its significance for modern artists, archaeologists, and art historians in mapping out an aesthetic of antiquity in the twentieth century. The book is beautifully written and lavishly illustrated. -- Jas Elsner, Corpus Christi College Oxford and the University of Chicago

Zainab Bahrani's The Infinite Image is at once a massively important contribution to the study of ancient Mesopotamian art and a brilliant intervention into the history and theory of art and aesthetics. It decisively overturns the deeply entrenched cliches that regard art as a uniquely western European invention. But it also mobilizes a rich array of textual sources to reconstruct the whole discourse around images and their cultural lives in the ancient world, a discourse that will strike many readers as having an uncanny timeliness in the era of the pictorial turn. Magnificently illustrated with images from the ancient, classical, and modern worlds, this book will be essential reading for scholars of art history, visual culture, aesthetics, and iconology. --W. J. T. Mitchell, author of Seeing Through Race Zainab Bahrani s The Infinite Image is at once a massively important contribution to the study of ancient Mesopotamian art and a brilliant intervention into the history and theory of art and aesthetics. It decisively overturns the deeply entrenched cliches that regard art as a uniquely western European invention. But it also mobilizes a rich array of textual sources to reconstruct the whole discourse around images and their cultural lives in the ancient world, a discourse that will strike many readers as having an uncanny timeliness in the era of the pictorial turn. Magnificently illustrated with images from the ancient, classical, and modern worlds, this book will be essential reading for scholars of art history, visual culture, aesthetics, and iconology. --W. J. T. Mitchell, author of Seeing Through Race Zainab Bahrani s The Infinite Image is at once a massively important contribution to the study of ancient Mesopotamian art and a brilliant intervention into the history and theory of art and aesthetics. It decisively overturns the deeply entrenched cliches that regard art as a uniquely western European invention. But it also mobilizes a rich array of textual sources to reconstruct the whole discourse around images and their cultural lives in the ancient world, a discourse that will strike many readers as having an uncanny timeliness in the era of the pictorial turn. Magnificently illustrated with images from the ancient, classical, and modern worlds, this book will be essential reading for scholars of art history, visual culture, aesthetics, and iconology. --W. J. T. Mitchell, author of Seeing Through Race

Author Information

Zainab Bahrani is the Edith Porada Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, New York. She is the author of Rituals of War: The Body and Violence in Mesopotamia (2008), The Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria (2003) and Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia (2001).

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