Iranian art created relatively few works of major importance, but rather many groups of objects, usually small and portable, with great artistic appeal. Animals were favoured as subjects. Their bodies were often transformed into severely formal compositions which nevertheless possess a mysterious life of their own. In them the beholder enjoys pure form and its enlivenment. A large number of the 61 colour plates of this book show such animal representations--boar, ibex and lion--from the various periods of ancient Iranian art. Edith Porada was an Austrian-born art historian and archaeologist, a leading authority on ancient cylinder seals and a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University. Comes with its box, with slight bumping but the book itself in excellent condition