Cyrus the Great and the Persepolis Reliefs: a Painting

Cyrus the Great is a painting of the founder of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, shown in profile the way the stone carvers of Persepolis showed their kings. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas with gold leaf and relief texture, 80 × 70 cm, by Maryam Moghaddam, an abstract figurative painter — women, myth and movement — with studios in Newmarket, Ontario and Sweden.

The story of Cyrus

Cyrus II of Persia reigned from about 559 to 530 BC. He united the Persians and the Medes, took Lydia from King Croesus, and in 539 BC entered Babylon; within a single generation his empire ran from the Aegean to Central Asia, the largest the world had yet seen. The Cyrus Cylinder, now in the British Museum, records how he restored temples and sent deported peoples home; the Hebrew Bible remembers him as the king who let the exiles return to Jerusalem. His tomb still stands at Pasargadae.

Persepolis came a generation later: Darius I began it as the ceremonial heart of the empire Cyrus had founded. Its staircases are carved with the king enthroned, his guards and nobles, and gift-bearing delegations from every nation of the empire — all in profile, with tall crowns and beards curled in tight rows. That carving is the painting’s language. As the artist writes: “Cyrus founded an empire on a radical idea: that conquered peoples could keep their gods, their languages, their dignity. This painting honours that legacy — power rendered not as force, but as endurance.”

How the painting is made

“Carved from shadow and burnished gold, the King of Kings emerges in profile — crowned, bearded, eternal.” The painting renders ancient carving in heavy sculpted texture: the crown rises in ridged gold leaf, and the beard curls in relief “you can feel with your eyes”. Around the head, layers of ochre, bronze and deep green break through one another “like memory through stone”: a palace wall weathered by twenty-five centuries. The surface cannot be rolled, and the work travels in a custom wooden crate.

Where it would live

At 80 × 70 cm this is a painting on a human scale, made to be seen close, where the relief of the beard and crown can be read by eye. It belongs in a study, a library or a dining room, above a hallway console, or behind a desk. Gold leaf answers to light: in lamplight it glows, in daylight it flashes as you move past. Deep green, charcoal or warm plaster walls suit it, and a single picture light is all it needs after dark.

Collect

The original Cyrus the Great (80 × 70 cm, acrylic and mixed media with gold leaf and relief texture, CAD 3,000) is a one-of-a-kind work, signed by the artist, shipped crated and insured worldwide from Newmarket, Ontario with a certificate of authenticity: see the original painting. Other works are available as fine-art prints: See the prints.