[Sasanian Relief Sculpture at Naqsh-i Rustam: The Investiture of King Ardeshir I by the Zoroastrian God Ohrmazd]
Luigi Pesce Italian
Not on view
With an authority that no other medium could achieve, the newly invented process of photography brought western Europeans a truthful and evocative record of faraway sights. Luigi Pesce, a Neapolitan who became commander in chief of the Persian infantry in 1848, made the earliest photographs of Persian antiquities and Islamic architecture.
This view of a third-century sculptural relief at Naqsh-i Rustam, near Persepolis, in modern-day Iran, is one of seventy-five rare early photographs of the region in an album donated to the Metropolitan by the late Charles K. Wilkinson. Wilkinson joined the Museum's archaeological expedition in Egypt in 1920, became curator of Ancient Near Eastern Art in 1956, and headed the Department from 1959 until his retirement in 1963.
