Jonathan Cohen's photos with the keyword: lion

Lèse-majesté is an archaic legal term that describes the crime of insulting a sovereign – in this case, flipping the bird to the king of beasts.

This marble figure represents a lion with its mouth open, crouching for a spring. It was placed at the foot of the Monument as a guardian of the tomb. There were perhaps originally four, one at each corner. The style of the sculpture appears earlier than that of the Monument itself. They may be reused from some previous tomb decoration, or is perhaps contemporary with the Nereid Monument, but deliberately archaizing.

This Assyrian alabaster panel from the palace at Nineveh, 645-635 BCE depicts a pair of protective spirits. Despite appearances, these figures are not fighting one other but rather are protecting against any evil that might approach from either direction. This kind of spirit was known as an "ugallu" – a protective lion.According to Wikipedia, Ugallu was a lion-headed storm-demon which has the feet of a bird and appears on protective amulets and apotropaic yellow clay or tamarisk figurines. Although the figurines and amulets date from the first millennium BCE, Ugallu had its origins in the early second millennium. He was one of the class of ud-demons (day-demons), personifying moments of divine intervention in human life. The iconography changed over time, with his human feet morphing into an eagle’s talons and his attire into a short skirt. According to the first tablet of the Epic of Creation, Enûma Eliš, Ugallu was one of the eleven mythical monsters created by Tiamat in her cosmic conflict with the younger gods led by Marduk. The tale describes how Marduk captured and bound these creatures, and rehabilitated them as part of his work of reconstructing the world from the corpses of his vanquished adversaries. This transformed them into protective charms which would be used to adorn the doors of palaces, for example that of Ashurbanipal’s southwest palace at Nineveh, temples, such as the Esagil of the Marduk temple as described in the Agum-Kakrime Inscription, and private dwellings (the bedrooms of the vulnerable) to ward off evil and disease. Ugallu first appears figuratively in the Old Babylonian period as a porter of the underworld, a servant of Nergal. In later times he is represented on amulets as frequently paired with the Sumerian demon Lulal, who was in many respects fairly similar in appearance. He is portrayed clasping a dagger in one hand and a mace in the other.

In ancient Assyria, lion-hunting was considered the sport of kings, symbolic of the ruling monarch’s duty to protect and fight for his people. The sculpted reliefs in the British Museum illustrate the sporting exploits of the last great Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal (668-631 BCE) and were created for his palace at Nineveh (in modern-day northern Iraq). The hunt scenes, full of tension and realism, rank among the finest achievements of Assyrian Art. They depict the release of the lions, the ensuing chase and subsequent killing. In these two panels, we see King Ashurbanipal driving his spear into the mouth of one lion, while a second lion, which had been hit by arrows and left for dead, leaps up to maul the king’s spare horse. Attendants gallop to the rescue from the left. In the next episode, the king has killed both lions. Some attendants admire them; others, kneeling in disgrace, were probably the ones who had allowed their horses to lag too far behind the king’s.

In ancient Assyria, lion-hunting was considered the sport of kings, symbolic of the ruling monarch’s duty to protect and fight for his people. The sculpted reliefs in the British Museum illustrate the sporting exploits of the last great Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal (668-631 BCE) and were created for his palace at Nineveh (in modern-day northern Iraq). The hunt scenes, full of tension and realism, rank among the finest achievements of Assyrian Art. They depict the release of the lions, the ensuing chase and subsequent killing. In these two panels, we see King Ashurbanipal driving his spear into the mouth of one lion, while a second lion, which had been hit by arrows and left for dead, leaps up to maul the king’s spare horse. Attendants gallop to the rescue from the left. In the next episode, the king has killed both lions. Some attendants admire them; others, kneeling in disgrace, were probably the ones who had allowed their horses to lag too far behind the king’s.

This is one of the two stone lions, sculpted in 1914 by Sir George Frampton RA, imperiously guarding the less-well-known northern entrance to the British Museum, on Montague Place. The vast majority of visitors use the main entrance on Great Russell Street, so sadly miss these glorious examples of New Sculpture. The term "New Sculpture" was coined by the first historian of the movement, the critic Edmund Gosse, who wrote a four-part series for The Art Journal in 1894. After a protracted period of a stylized neoclassicism, sculpture in the last quarter of the century began to explore a greater degree of naturalism and wider range of subject matter. The French sculptor Jules Dalou, in his eight-year English exile after the Paris Commune events in 1871, taught modelling at the South Kensington School of Art, and then at the Lambeth School of Art. He profoundly influenced a new generation of British sculptors, helping to usher in a new approach to the medium. The catalyst for this development is usually understood to be the exhibition, in 1877, of Frederic Leighton’s Athlete Wrestling with a Python. This was Leighton’s first major sculpture, and he intended it as a challenge to the prevailing styles of sculpture. It reflected his interest in a more dynamic and vibrant representation of the human body and a shift from easily legible and didactic subject matter. Many sculptors looked to the Athlete and created responses to it in the following years. The New Sculpture represents an alternate formulation of a new direction for sculpture at the end of the nineteenth century. Whereas the major French alternative to mid-19th-century sculpture, Auguste Rodin, increasingly left the accurate representation of the human body behind, the New Sculptors by and large chose to grapple with issues arising from the naturalistic representation of the body and the detailed rendering of its surface variations. The New Sculpture does not represent one singular style, but rather a range of options developed to make sculpture more vital and lifelike.

The Lion de la Feuillée is a monument located inside the Montreal Botanical Garden. The huge lion that lies at the entrance to the rose garden was donated in 1992 by the city of Lyon, France on the occasion of the 350th anniversary of the founding of Montreal. The original Feuillée bridge over the Saône River was opened to the public on September 28, 1831 in the heart of the old city of Lyon. The Feuillée Lion is one of four castings of the original work. During the reconstruction of the bridge in 1910, the four lions were relocated. In 1992, one of them found its way to Montreal.

The Taft Bridge, also known as the Connecticut Avenue Bridge or William Howard Taft Bridge, is a historic bridge in Washington D.C. that carries Connecticut Avenue over the Rock Creek gorge. The bridge is "guarded" by four large male lions, two on each end of the bridge (each approx. 7 ft. x 6 ft. 6 in. x 13 ft.). Two of the lions rest on all fours with their heads tilted upwards and mouths slightly open while the other pair lie with their eyes closed, apparently sleeping. They were originally designed and sculpted by Roland Hinton Perry in 1906 out of cast concrete (the bridge as a whole is one of the first cast concrete bridges in the country) and were installed in 1907. By the 1990’s, the lions were in very bad condition and ultimately found to be beyond restoring. The sculptor Reinaldo Lopez-Carrizo produced molds based on the existing sculptures and photographs, and used them to cast new concrete lion sculptures that were installed on the bridge in July and August 2000. The same molds were used to cast bronze lions installed at the main pedestrian entrance to the National Zoo farther north on Connecticut Avenue in 2002.

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