Wall Paintings in the Palace of Nuzi

Traces of color found in the debris of collapsed walls suggest that many rooms of the palace of Nuzi had been painted. Although most walls were painted in one of several colors, a few elaborately decorated fragments of the palace walls survived and were still vibrant enough to be photographed and drawn in situ. These wall paintings (see 1928.182.1, and the fragments 1928.182.2–3) stimulated a great deal of excitement among the excavators when they were first discovered; that emotion turned to concern and then disappointment when difficulties arose in the extraction, transportation, and display of the fragile artifacts.

The excavators cut out and packaged a substantial portion of the mudbrick walls upon which the elaborate wall paintings were executed. The hope was to carefully extract the design and then preserve it under more controlled laboratory conditions. Unfortunately, the majority of the mudbrick wall segments did not survive shipping, arriving at Harvard as crumbled fragments.

Luckily, the designs had been copied by the excavation’s architect, Emmanuel Wilensky, while still in situ, and these drawings of the ruined wall paintings were displayed and exchanged between the Fogg and Semitic museums. Wilensky’s original field copies have been lost, although the Semitic Museum has photographs of the drawings taken soon after completion at the site.

In addition, before the loss of Wilensky’s drawings, Edward W. Forbes, director of the Fogg Museum, had new color copies made for the Fogg. Helen Gilman and Lucille Chabot, temporary Fogg staff, created watercolor copies of Wilensky’s drawings between 1941 and 1943, using the original mudbrick fragments for color reference. The Gilman and Chabot Nuzi wall painting reproductions were framed and displayed in the Fogg and other Harvard buildings between 1943 and 1992, at which point they were removed to storage. The Arthur M. Sackler Museum thus holds the surviving fragments of the unique and original Nuzi wall paintings in addition to the excellent color reproductions by Gilman and Chabot (Chabot later became a nationally recognized folk artist for her work with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s WPA).