Arresto e movimento, organicità e astrazione. Morfogenesi e canoni figurativi nella statuaria mesopotamica del III millennio a.C.

‘Arrest and movement’ by Henriette Antonia Groenewegen-Frankfort and ‘Organicità e astrazione’ by Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli remain two essays from the 1950s that are still fundamental for investigating the transformation of the works of art because they outline the passage from mythopoeic thought to western logos, or to realism and abstraction as expressions of creativity in the Modern Age. This distinction and passage reveal all the complexity of the relationship between the East, realm of the ‘symbolic’ and the West of ‘rationality’ conceived by Hegelian aesthetics. However the cognitive sciences today also offer the opportunity to analyze the formation of a figurative context by integrating the two approaches. In this contribution the two approaches are the perspectives from which to investigate a classic theme of Archeology and the Art History of the ancient Near East: the morphogenesis of Mesopotamian statues of the 3rd millennium BC.