Claire Selvin reports for ARTnews:
A 3,000-year-old Assyrian relief featuring a figure known as the Winged Genius will go to auction at a Christie’s antiquities sale in New York on October 31. The Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria is selling the work, which is estimated to go for between $10 million and $15 million, to underwrite a scholarship fund.
The gypsum relief is over seven feet tall, and it once adorned the walls of the Northwest Palace of King Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud in what is now Iraq. The figure depicted in the stone, a deity known as Apkallu, holds a bucket and a cone-shaped object that represent fertility and protection for the king.
