A history of art in Chaldæa & Assyria, Vol. 2 (of 2)

§ 1.—The principal themes of Chaldæo-Assyrian Sculpture.

The Egyptian notions as to a future life had much to do with the rapidity with which the art of sculpture was developed during the early years of their history. There was a close relation between their religion and the rites it implied, on the one hand, and the peculiar characteristics of the most ancient Memphite sculptures on the other. We cannot say the same of Chaldæa. So far as our present knowledge extends, we have no reason to suppose that the first efforts of the Mesopotamian sculptor were directed to providing the umbra, the immaterial inhabitant of the tomb, with a material support which should resemble as closely as possible the body of flesh and bones that, in spite of every precaution, would sooner or later end in dust and nothingness. No monument has come down to us in which we can recognize a portrait image executed for a sepulchre.[100]

And yet the basis of the Chaldæan religion was similar to that of Egypt. Taken as a whole, the beliefs as to a posthumous life were the same in both countries. Why then had they such different effects upon the arts? For this we may give several reasons. The first is the comparatively small importance forced upon the Chaldæan tomb by the nature of the soil. In mere coffins of terra-cotta, and even in those narrow brick vaults that are met with at certain points, at Mugheir and Warka for instance, there is no room for a single statue, still less for the crowds of images held by a Gizeh or Sakkarah mastaba. Add to this that stone was rare and dear, that it had to be brought from a great distance, and we shall comprehend why funerary rites and the worship of the dead exercised no appreciable influence over Chaldæan sculpture.

Here the beginnings of art are more obscure than in Egypt. In the first place we cannot trace them back nearly so far, in the second both statues and bas-reliefs are much less numerous. In spite of recent discoveries, to which we owe much, Egypt still remains unrivalled both by the prodigious antiquity into whose depths she allows us to catch a glimpse, and by the ever-increasing multitude of monuments and tombs that are found in her soil. The night that hides the birth of civilization is darker in Mesopotamia than in the Nile valley; it does not allow us to perceive how the plastic faculty was first awakened, and why it took one direction more than another; we cannot tell why the modeller of Lower Chaldæa set himself to handle clay, or carve wood and stone into the shape of some real or fantastic creature. On the other hand, when we study Chaldæan sculpture in the oldest of those works that have come down to us, we are struck by the fact that, even in the remote centuries to which those carvings belong, Chaldæan art interested itself in all the aspects of nature and in every variety of living form. It had nevertheless its favourite themes, namely, the representations of royal and divine personages.

When first called upon to suggest the ideas of divine power and perfection, art had no other resource but to borrow features and characteristics from those mortal forms that must always, in one point or another, seem incomplete and unfinished. Of all undertakings that could be proposed to it, this was at once the most noble and the most difficult. To find a real solution of the problem we must turn to the Greeks. Of all ancient peoples they were the first to perceive the unrivalled nobility of the human form; they were the first to decide that the notion of divine superiority, of a divine principle, could be best suggested in all its infinite varieties, through that form. We shall see them obtain the results at which they aimed by giving to man’s body and features a charm, a grandeur, a purity of line—in a word, a perfection, to which no single living member of the race can attain. The Chaldæans had no sufficiently clear idea of such a system, and, more especially, they never acquired enough familiarity with the nude, to rival the grace and dignity given by the Greeks to their divine types; but their art was more frankly anthropomorphic than that of Egypt, and, as we shall have occasion to show, it created many types that were transmitted to the Mediterranean nations, and soon adopted by them. These types were perfected, but not invented, by the Greeks.

We have already given more than one example of how the Chaldæan intellect set about the manifestation of its ideas as to gods and demons, how it expressed their characteristics by heterogeneous forms borrowed from various real animals. The powers of evil were first embodied in this fashion (Vol. I. Figs. 6, 7, 161, 162). The sculptor went far afield to find the elements of ugliness that he wished to combine in a single being; this is nowhere to be better seen than in a bronze statuette belonging to the Louvre (Fig. 32). Here too we are better informed than usual. An inscription engraved on the back tells us that this is the demon of the south-west wind, the most scorching and generally unpleasant of the winds that visit Mesopotamia. The ring in the head served to hang it up in front of the window or doorway of a house. Thanks to such a precaution, the inhabitants of that dwelling would be protected against the ill effects of the parching breath of the desert. The sculptor has wished to make this tyrant of the atmosphere as hideous and repulsive as possible, and he has only succeeded too well. One can hardly imagine anything more frightful than his grinning, quasi-human countenance, resembling a death’s head in some of its lines; the great round eyes and goat’s horns with which it is surrounded add to its deformity. Its meagre body has some hints at hair on its right side. The hands are large and flat, the fingers short and blunt, while the feet are a curious combination of human extremities with the talons of a bird of prey.

On the other hand this mixture of forms is by no means repulsive in the case of certain personages who appear to belong either to the class of beneficent genii or to that of the great deities of the Chaldee pantheon. The combination is especially well managed in the winged bulls. The head is that of a man, but about the tiara with which it is crowned several pairs of horns are bent. These horns are among the attributes of the beast by whose nature this complex being is dominated. They are part of the offensive armament of the one animal which enjoys in popular esteem an equal reputation for strength with the lion. The body and limbs, too, are those of a bull, while the curly main recalls that of the king of beasts. The whole is completed by a pair of large wings borrowed from the eagle.

Nothing could be clearer than the governing idea of this conception. The artist has wished to unite in a single being the highest powers of life and nature—the bull, the lion, the eagle: these are types of physical force differently applied. Patient and tenacious in the bull, who drags the plough and transports the heaviest burdens; violent and impetuous in the lion, while in the king of birds the formidable strength of beak and talons add to the fear inspired by his lightning flight. Finally, the head and countenance are those of a man, the impersonation of intelligent force, of will governed by reflection, before which every living thing has to bow.

The root of this conception is the same as that by which the Egyptian sphinx was suggested. The chief differences lie in the greater complexity of the winged bull and in its less quiescent attitude. The sphinx combines but two elements, the man and the lion; its pose is easier and perhaps more natural than that of the Assyrian animal. It is extended on the ground, its paws stretched idly before it, an attitude that could be preserved without fatigue for an indefinite time, and therefore in complete accordance with its governing idea, and with the function it had to fill at the gates of a palace or temple. That idea, for the bull as well as the sphinx, was force in repose. But the bull stands upright, and, when looked at from one side, seems to walk. We feel that if he did complete his stride he would bring the structure that stands on his loins down about our ears.

Here, as in most cases where comparison is possible, the advantage remains with Egypt. But yet the Assyrian type is by no means without a certain nobility and beauty of its own. In spite of their colossal dimensions, in spite of the supernatural vigour of their limbs and the exaggerated energy and salience of their muscles, there is a kind of robust grace in the leading lines and proportions of these figures to which we cannot be indifferent, and their effect is increased by the wings that lie along their backs and furnish so happily the upper part of the huge alabaster slabs, above which nothing rises but the horned tiara. Finally, the face with its strongly marked features, with its frame of closely curled hair and beard arranged in the strictest symmetry, is still more remarkable than all the rest (Fig. 33). The expression is grave and proud, and sometimes almost smiling. It is in fine harmony with the general idea that led the Chaldæans to create these mysterious but kindly beings, and to endow them with their mighty frames of stone.[101]

These bulls have only been actually found in Assyria, but numerous and precise texts have been deciphered by which their existence at the gateways of Chaldæan temples and palaces has been proved.[102] They are not now to be met with in the country of their origin, because their material was too rare in the lower part of the great basin to escape the attacks of spoilers. Soft or hard, volcanic or calcareous, stone was there precious and difficult to find. Sooner or later such objects as these would be dragged from their ancient sites and broken up to be used anew. If chance had not so willed that the Assyrian palaces were preserved for us by entombment in their own ruins, we should now have known nothing of a type that played a great part in the decoration of Mesopotamian buildings, and, by its originality, made a great impression upon neighbouring peoples; or at least we should only know it by reproductions on a very small scale, like those we meet with on the cylinders, or by imitations vastly inferior to the originals, like those of the palaces at Persepolis.

Instead of a human head on the body of a beast, we sometimes find the process reversed, but always with an amount of taste and reserve to which we are compelled to render due praise. We may, of course, quote instances in which the head of an eagle is put upon a human body (Vol. I. Fig. 8), or the shoulders of a man concealed under a fish’s scales (Vol. I. Fig. 9, and above, Fig. 34); but even then the sculptor has succeeded in giving to the characteristic lines and attitudes of the human figure the predominance that belongs to them, and, as it were, has made them cast an air of nobility over the whole composition.

It is thus with a curious type to which our reader’s attention should be drawn; we mean that of the personage called Izdubar by some Assyriologists, and Hea-bani by others. Whichever name we may choose, the person in question was “a mighty hunter,” like the Nimrod of Genesis, a hero distinguished for his valour and for the difficulties he overcame. So that he might be free in his movements and ready for every work of activity and vigour, he is naked. Even under the dry method of the Chaldæan gem engraver we can appreciate the amplitude of his form and the power of his muscles. He is also distinguished by the size of his face, which is always fully seen, and seems to be the result of a compromise between the features of a man and those of a lion. This deliberately exaggerated head is enframed in long shaggy hair. Upon some cylinders we see Izdubar in a state of repose, behind the throne of a god to whom he acts as acolyte or guard of honour (Vol. I., Fig. 17), elsewhere he is seen in the exercise of his functions, if we may call them so, accomplishing some such task as those that made the fame of the Greek Hercules, whose ancestor he may perhaps have been. We find him on a cylinder in the British Museum carrying off a slain lion on his shoulders (Fig. 35).

We again find the human form predominant in those great winged genii for which Chaldæan art had so strong a predilection (Figs. 4 and 29). The two pairs of wings are very happily allied to the body, and both Greek and modern art has had recourse to the type thus created, the former for the figures of certain minor divinities, especially for that of Victory, and Christian art for its angels. In both these instances, however, we find but a single pair of wings. The artists of Assyria, especially in their rare attempts to treat the figure from a front view, have used the two pairs of wings with great felicity to furnish the background, against which the human form stands out in all the vigour of its robust muscularity. Our readers may judge of this from our reproduction of one of the reliefs brought to the Louvre from Khorsabad (Fig. 36).

These winged men serve as a kind of transition between the complex beings noticed above, and the sculptures in which the human form is treated without any supernatural additions. So far as we can guess in our present uncertainty as to the ranks of the celestial hierarchy of Chaldæa, it would appear that the forms and features of men and women were alone thought worthy to represent the greatest of their divinities. Take the statue of Nebo, figured on page 81 of our last volume, take the gods introduced into the ceremonies we have already figured (Vol. I., Figs. 13 and 14), after reliefs from Nimroud and Kouyundjik (Fig. 37).[103] In this last-named work the god, Raman or Marduk, holds a flower. At Nimroud there is a god with horned forehead who grasps an axe in one hand and a thunderbolt in the other. In the female figure, twice repeated with slightly different attributes, that precedes the god, Istar has been recognized. See also the statue of Istar in Vol. I., Fig. 16, and the image of that Chaldæan Venus so often repeated on the cylinders (Figs. 38 and 39). In form Istar is but a woman, and the artist would have made her beautiful if he had known how. She is shown naked, against the general custom of an art that everywhere else hid the human body under ample draperies. This nudity must have been intended to suggest those feminine charms by which desire is awakened and life preserved on the world.

The supreme gods, the Bels or Lords, were treated in the same way when all the majesty of their station had to be suggested. Each of these had his domicile in one of the principal sanctuaries of Chaldæa and Syria. At Sippara it was Samas, or the sun personified (Vol. I., Fig. 71); upon the seal of Ourkam (Vol. I., Fig. 3), upon another cylinder on which there are many curious and inexplicable details (Fig. 17), and upon a last monument of the same kind which dates from the early centuries of Chaldæan civilization (Fig. 40), it is a Bel whose name escapes us;[104] but in all the theme is the same, and the type almost exactly similar. We can hardly be mistaken in recognizing a god in the personage seated on a richly decorated throne, towards whom two or three figures, sometimes of smaller size than himself, advance in an attitude of respectful homage. He is crowned with a lofty tiara, a long beard flows over his breast, a robe of fine plaited stuff enwraps his whole body and falls to his feet. He is a man in the prime of life; his air and costume must have been taken from those of the king. May we not look upon him as the first sketch for the Greek Zeus, the Zeus of Homer and Phidias?

This type is never disfigured by any of those attempts, of which the Chaldæans were so fond, to add to the significance of the human figure by endowing it with features borrowed from various lower animals. It should be noticed, however, that on one of the cylinders we have figured (Vol. I., Fig. 17) there is a personage with two faces, like the Roman Janus. But this is not the seated god. It is not the great deity before whom the other actors in the scene stand erect, it is one of the secondary personages, one of the inferior divinities who bring offerings or receive instructions, in short, one of those genii whose numerous and complex attributes first suggested these fantastic combinations.

We find then that when the Chaldæans set themselves to search for the most suitable way of figuring their gods, they ended by thoroughly appreciating the excellence of the human form; with a few exceptions, they abandoned the idea of correcting and perfecting it; they were content to copy it sincerely and unaffectedly, to render the characteristic features of the maid and the mother, the youth and the man of mature age to whom years have lent dignity without taking away vitality. These forms they covered as a rule with ample drapery, but for certain types, those, for instance, of the goddess of love and fecundity, and the demi-god whom we have compared to the Greek Hercules, they had recourse to all the frankness of nudity. How was it that under such conditions they never succeeded in endowing their goddesses with grace, or their gods with nobility of form? Can it be denied that the few nude figures they have left us are far inferior, not only to those the Greeks were afterwards to design with so sure a hand, but even to the hundreds and thousands of human forms with which the Egyptians had already peopled their bas-reliefs and funerary pictures?

Their first fault lay in an exaggerated striving after fidelity. They insisted blindly on certain details which are elsewhere suppressed or dissimulated, in obedience to a compromise which has been so generally accepted that it must surely be founded on reason. We may judge of this by two ivory fragments chosen from among those that were found in such numbers at Nimroud. They are, in all probability, statuettes of Istar (Figs. 41 and 42). The sculptor had noticed that the female pelvis was larger than the male, but he exaggerates its size and that of the bosom. The deep folds of the abdomen indicate an exhausted vitality, that of a woman who has been many times a mother, and other details of this region are rendered with a clumsy insistance.[105]

There is no evidence in Chaldæan art of the feeling for proportion which distinguishes Egyptian sculpture. Its renderings of the human figure are nearly always too short and thickset; even those works which by their general facility and justness of movement most strongly attract our admiration, are not free from this fault. Its effects may be estimated very clearly from the stele representing Marduk-idin-akhi, a king of Babylon (Fig. 43), whose date is placed in about the twelfth century B.C. It is true that the defect in question is more conspicuous in this relief than, perhaps, in any other work of the school to which we can point; but in all it is more or less perceptible. In Assyria, under the later Sargonids, sculptors made an effort to correct it, but even their comparatively slender figures have a certain heaviness. Assyrian sculpture has many good points, but it is never elegant. The Assyrian and Chaldæan sculptors were discouraged from acquiring a complete knowledge of the human form by the fact that it was not demanded by their patrons. The public who judged their works did not perceive their shortcomings in that respect. There was nothing in their daily life, or in the requirements they laboured to fulfil, which either assisted them to make good their deficiencies, or compelled them to do it for themselves. They seldom beheld the nude form, still more seldom did they have to introduce it into their works. The Greek writers speak of it as a peculiarity of “the barbarians,” whether Syrians or Chaldæans, Lydians or Persians, that they were ashamed to be seen naked, the men as much as the women. Such a scruple, especially in the male, would seem hardly comprehensible to the Greek accustomed to the nudity of the gymnasium.[106]

The origin of such a notion is to be sought, perhaps, so far as Mesopotamia is concerned, in a wise hygiene and in the rapid changes of an uncertain climate. The difference between the extremes of summer and winter temperature is far greater than in Egypt or on the Ionian coasts, and precautions had to be taken at one time against a scorching sun, at another against the cold of the nights. However this may have been, it is certain that these people, although they lived in a hot country, went about in a costume that covered their bodies as completely as that of modern Europe. It consisted of a long tunic, a tunica talaria (?) as the Romans would call it, and a mantle. The tunic left nothing exposed but the head and neck, the forearms, and the feet and ankles. It must have been of linen or hempen cloth;[107] when worn by a rich man it was embroidered and decorated about the foot with a sort of gimp fringe. The tunics of the poor were short and plain, often coming hardly lower than the knee. They were also looser and better fitted to work in; but they are never wanting altogether, even to the men of the corvée, the slaves and prisoners of war whom we see employed in the construction of the royal buildings (Vol. I. Figs. 151 and 152). Women were dressed in chemises coming down to their feet (Vol. I. Fig. 30), resembling the long robe of coarse blue cotton which still forms the only garment of the peasant women of Egypt and Syria. Sometimes we find a sort of cape thrown over the tunic (Vol. I. Fig. 31, and below, Fig. 44).

As for the mantle, it was a fringed shawl, and, like the Greek peplos or the Roman toga, could be arranged in many different ways. In the painting at Beni-Hassan which shows us the arrival in Egypt of a band of Asiatic emigrants,[108] it leaves one shoulder and both arms uncovered, and forms a kind of frock round the body, which it entirely conceals. In the old Chaldæan statues from Sirtella the arrangement is more graceful (see Plate VI.); the piece of cloth is folded double and carried obliquely round the body so as to cover the left arm and shoulder and leave the right bare. The end is simply passed under the first fold, by which it is tightly held.[109] There is no trace of a tunic. In Assyria the mantle was variously arranged. It always left one shoulder free, which was covered, however, by the tunic. As a rule it reached to the feet (Vol. I. Fig. 22), but sometimes it was so contrived as to leave one leg exposed from the knee downwards. The robes of Sargon praying before the sacred tree are thus arranged (Fig. 45).

As for the women’s dress, it was still more impenetrable than that of the men. In the Assyrian bas-reliefs there are very few figures of women on any considerable scale. We can hardly point to an instance, except in the slab where Assurbanipal and his queen are shown feasting in a garden (Vol. I. Fig. 28). In this carved picture the queen is robed in a tunic and mantle, over which the embroiderers needle has thrown a profusion of those rosettes that are so popular in Mesopotamia!! art. We are allowed to glean no hint of the personal charms of the favoured sultana, who must have been young and beautiful. They are entirely masked by the envelope in which she is wrapped.

In all this we are far enough from the semi-nudity of the Egyptian sculptures, to say nothing of the frank display of the Greeks. On the banks of the Nile, where the climate had no violent changes and the air was deliciously dry and limpid, both poor and rich, both the king and his subjects, were contented with the white drawers, which were carefully plaited and knotted about the hips. On great occasions, when, as we should say, they wished to dress themselves, they put on long, bright-coloured, and elegantly embroidered robes; but those robes were of a fine linen tissue, every contour of the body could be easily followed through them, the age and character of every form could be distinctly appreciated.

The artist, even when he had to represent the wives and daughters of Pharaoh or the most august of the female deities, showed under their draperies the contours of their breasts, their hips, and the insertions of their limbs.[110] Still more transparent were the robes in which the dancing and singing women who occur so often in the tomb pictures were draped.[111] The calculated indiscretions of this sort of coa vestis invited the painter and sculptor to do justice to the elegance of the female form.

How different and how much less favourable were the conditions under which the Assyrian sculptor exercised his art! For him the contours of the body and the attachments of the limbs were hidden behind heavy tunics covered with embroidery, and shawls often folded double. If by chance he caught a passing glimpse of the forms beneath, to what use could he put it? Two or three at the most of the divine types upon which his skill was most frequently employed involved a very partial nudity; most of the gods, and nearly all the men, were draped. In a few very rare instances we find an Assyrian stripped of his clothes and crossing a river by means of an inflated skin.[112] But these figures, though fairly well drawn, are very small in scale, and occupy but a subordinate place in the bas-relief where they occur.[113]

Corpses stripped naked by the victor on the battle-field are of more frequent occurrence; but these, being the bodies of despised and hated enemies, are treated in very summary fashion.[114] We may say the same of the prisoners whom they behead and flay alive.[115] The mutilated statue of a nude female, rather less than life, which bears a votive inscription of Assurbilkala, the son of Tiglath-Pileser, and is now in the British Museum, is a great rarity. It is believed to represent Istar. The execution is careful, but the forms are clumsy and the proportions bad; the bust is a great deal too short.[116]

By his failure to appreciate living form for its own sake, for its beauty of line and harmony of proportion, the Mesopotamian sculptor put a voluntary limit to his ambition. He renounced, in advance, the only means within his reach of borrowing from the human figure the elements for a representation of the deity which should preserve a character of indefinite existence, of natural and sovereign excellence. But this abstention, or, if you like, this impotence, did not prevent Assyrian artists from fulfilling, in the most brilliant fashion, the other part of the task to which they were called by the habits and requirements of the society for which they laboured. The sculptors were mainly employed by the king; their chief business was to multiply his images; they were charged to commemorate the sovereign in every act of his life, in every one of the many parts involved by his indefatigable activity as builder, chief-justice, hunter, commander-in-chief, and supreme pontiff. From the king himself to the last of his soldiers or prisoners, every one who had his own marked place in a picture was draped; the sculptor could reproduce every episode of the royal life in the truest and most animated fashion, without ever having learnt to draw the nude. In fact, he was not called upon, like the Greek artist, to procure for the æsthetic sense the pure joys that are given by the sight of noble forms or movements well rendered; his duty was to commemorate by a series of clear and lively images those events that were celebrated in words in the text inscribed upon the very alabaster slabs beneath his hand.

Assyrian sculpture had this documentary character in the very highest degree; its creations, in the intention of those by whom they were commissioned, were less works of art than records.[117] The long inscriptions and the endless series of pictures with which the palace walls were covered were no more than an illustrated book.

And in what class of literature should that book be placed? It has been called an epic illustrated by sculptors—a description that seems hardly just. For in every epic worthy of the name the marvellous occupies an important place, while in these reliefs it scarcely has a place at all. With few exceptions the belief in a superior and divine world makes itself felt in Assyrian art only in those effigies of gods and demons we have already described. And such images have their places rigidly fixed by tradition; they stand at the palace gates, but are scarcely ever found within its saloons, and are entirely absent from the marches, battles, and sieges. Here and there among such pictures, but at long intervals, we find some feature that reminds us of the aid that Assur and the other national gods afforded their worshippers; now it is an eagle floating over the king’s chariot;[118] now the god himself, surrounded by a winged circle, draws his bow and launches his formidable shafts against the enemies of his people.[119] He is thus represented mounted on a galloping bull in the ring by which the standards of the Assyrian legions were surmounted.

All these details were small in scale and unobtrusive. The rôle played by the architect was similar to that of the draughtsmen and photographers who sometimes accompany princes and generals on a modern campaign. The programme placed before him was as narrow as it could well be; he was required to be faithful and precise, not to give proof of inventive power.

The sculptor was, in a way, the editor of the military bulletins; his work was the newspaper of the day, explaining the political events of his time to those who could understand no other writing. There is complete coherence between his figures and the inscribed texts they accompany. Look, for instance, at the series of slabs from the Palace of Sennacherib, in which his Jewish campaign is retraced.[120] The final scene is thus described in words within a cartouche above the heads of the figures: “Sennacherib, king of Assyria, seated upon his throne of state, causes the prisoners taken in the town of Lachish to pass before him,”[121] In order to show the details of the magnificent chair upon which the king is seated we have reproduced only the two principal actors, in the sovereign and his grand vizier (Fig. 47). If we had been able to place the whole composition before our readers they would have seen how thoroughly the inscription describes it. Behind the general who is presenting the vanquished to the king, appear the prisoners, some prostrate, others kneeling or standing upright, but all turned towards their conqueror with gestures of supplication.

The spaces to be covered were vast, but the warlike kings of Assyria cut out enough work for their sculptors to keep them always busy. Every campaign, and every battle, every siege or passage of a river, seemed to them worthy of commemoration by the chisel. Those to whom the work was given were forced therefore to multiply figures; the task was complicated and yet had to be finished with extreme rapidity. The sovereign was in a hurry to enjoy the spectacle he had promised himself, he wished to inhabit for as many years as possible the dwelling whose walls, like so many magic mirrors, would reflect his own prowess and glory. And so the sculptor had to produce much and produce fast; we can therefore understand how it was that his creations never lost a certain look of improvisation. They had the good qualities of such a mode of work; namely, force, vitality, and abandon, but combined with all its defects, inequality, incoherence, and frequent repetition.

In order to cover the surface abandoned to the sculptor as quickly as possible, the work had to be divided; every one who was thought to be capable of wielding a chisel had to be pressed into the service. Sculptors of established fame who had already helped to decorate more than one palace, mediocre artists with more age and experience than talent, young apprentices entering the workshops for the first time, all were enlisted, and each received his share of the common task. Under such conditions, and especially when the utmost expedition was required, the collective work could not help showing signs of the many and variously skilled hands that had been employed upon it. Even with the Greeks, and even, which is still more to the point, with the Athenians of the age of Pericles, something of the same kind is to be noticed. The frieze of that temple of Pallas, which is, perhaps, the most carefully wrought creation of human hands, is not all equally fine in execution. Some parts show the work merely of a skilful carver, while before others we feel that here has been the hand of the great master himself, that the play of the chisel has been governed by the brain that traced the original sketch and thought out the whole marvellous conception.

And these differences are still more obvious in the great compositions turned out so rapidly by Assyrian sculptors. Examine at your leisure the long series of pictures from a single palace that hang on the walls of the British Museum—the only place where such a comparison is possible—and you will be astonished at the inequality of their execution. Among those taken from a single room some are far better than others. Here and there we find figures that seem to have been touched upon and corrected by an experienced artist, while their immediate neighbours are treated in a soft and hesitating fashion. Curiously enough the figures representing enemies are, as a rule, very roughly modelled; sometimes they are hardly more than blocked out. It seems as if they wished, from the beginning, to have no mistake as to relative dignity between the soldiers of Assur and those men of inferior race whom they condescended to slay.[122]

A hurried artist repeats himself deliberately. Repetition spares him the fatigue of reflection and invention. The Assyrians loved to represent processions. Sometimes these consist of the king’s servants carrying the ensign of royalty behind him (Vol. I. Figs. 22, 23, and 24); sometimes of priests carrying the images of the gods (Vol. I. Figs. 13 and 14); but more often of war chariots, cavalry, and infantry (Fig. 15), or bands of prisoners conducted by foot soldiers (Fig. 48). To groups and single individuals progressing in long succession the sculptor gave a certain rhythm that is not without its dignity, but yet his treatment of such themes is deficient in variety. The same fault occurs in Egyptian dealings with similar subjects; the figures seem all to reproduce a single type, as if they had been stencilled. The designer has made no real effort to avoid monotony; he has no suspicion of those skilful combinations by which the Greek sculptor would succeed in reconciling the unity of the whole with variety of detail; he makes no attempt to make those slight changes between one group and another that please and amuse the eye without hurting the general symmetry, or breaking those great leading lines by which the general character and movement of the composition is determined.[123]

The necessity for haste accounts for another defect of the same art. It was because he had no time that the sculptor did not choose and select, like the Greeks. The size of our page prevents us from reproducing one of those pictures in which the triumphs of Sennacherib are commemorated,[124] but some idea of that great military chronicle may be formed from the assault on page 30 (Fig. 30). There is nothing like a central group in which the episodes and incidents of the conflict could, as it were, be gathered up and epitomized. The sculptor exhausts himself in striving after the confused wealth of reality; our eye loses itself among the groups of combatants who seem to be sown broadcast over the field of the relief. The historian may find in it many curious details, but he who looks only for aesthetic enjoyment is soon bored. The whole composition is as confused as a real hand-to-hand fight.

In spite of all these defects, or perhaps owing to their existence, the realistic sculpture of Assyria must have had a strong attraction, not only for the kings, to whom it was a sort of apotheosis, but for their subjects, their officers, and for the soldiers who fought in the campaigns and brought off their share of the glory and spoil. We may well find these battle panoramas not a little wearisome; but if we put ourselves in the place of those who were actors in the scenes they portray, of those who could search among their countless, and, to us, often ambiguous incidents, and find, or think they found, their own deeds and persons introduced by the sculptor into his crowded pages, how great will be the change. The fatigue we feel will be changed into the interest that never palls of fighting one’s battles over again, and into the natural pride aroused by the pages of a history that chronicled no defeat, that spoke of nothing but the long sequence of victories won by the legions of Assyria over every nation that had the temerity to oppose her arms.

Such a spectacle had its eloquence and could not fail to react strongly upon those who gazed upon it, to incite them to new triumphs and to the renewed spoliation of their neighbours. In spite of its shortcomings, such an art had, then, one great merit; it was, in the highest degree, national; it was frankly inspired by the most universal passion of the people among whom it was born, by the ideas it suggested it helped to keep that passion alive and to add to its force, and so contributed not a little to develop the habits and sentiments in which the power and originality of a violent, fanatical, and warlike race consisted.

§ 2. Materials.

If the national dress and social régime, as well as the natural conditions of the country had their effect upon Mesopotamian art, so too had the materials employed. In our study of Egyptian sculpture we endeavoured to show how greatly the artist depended on his material, and what a strongly modifying effect the latter had upon the nature of the interpretation he could give to his thought.[125]

The monuments of Assyria especially invite the same remark. The Chaldæans seem to have made use, as a rule, of very hard rocks for their sculptures, rocks similar to those used by the later Egyptians for their more important works. In Chaldæa a stone statue was a rare object. On the few occasions when a Chaldæan prince, or even private individual, indulged in such a luxury, he did not spare expense; once in a way the cost did not matter; it was of far greater moment that the work should be durable, and blocks were brought from any distance that might be necessary to ensure that result. Thus it is that nearly all the monuments that have been recovered in the lower valley of the Euphrates are of basalt, diorite, or dolerite. The difference between the styles of the Egyptian and Chaldæan sculptures was not caused, then, by the materials employed, but by something far less easily defined—by the peculiar genius of the two peoples. They neither saw nature with the same eyes nor interpreted it in the same spirit.

The situation was rather different in Assyria. There a plentiful supply of easily-cut stone, alabaster, and several varieties of limestone of more or less hardness was to be had. These facilities had a double consequence: they led the Ninevite artist to make lavish use of sculpture in the decoration of buildings, and they had no little influence upon their habits of design and upon the executive processes they adopted. The most peculiar, the truly characteristic feature of their bas-reliefs so far as execution is concerned, is the combination of incisiveness and looseness in their handling. We feel that the chisel, in spite of the haste with which it worked, has been strongly driven. It is not so in the case of other countries; as a rule where work is rapid it is also slight and superficial. This apparent anomaly is to be explained by the qualities of the material. The alabaster used at Khorsabad and Kouyundjik is so soft that we can scratch it with the finger-nail, and even the limestone preferred by the artists of Assurbanipal is not much harder.[126] How this tempts the hand! Whether one tries to or not one writes boldly with a goose quill, and here the docility of the material becomes a danger. The carver’s tool, when it meets with no real resistance, runs away with the hand, and the sculptor is insensibly led on to over-accent his intentions, and to exaggerate his effects.