In the inventory we are compiling of the various methods used by the Semites of Mesopotamia to address the intellect through the eyes, we shall consecrate a chapter to painting for form’s sake. The kind of representation we call by that name was no more known to the Assyrians and Chaldæans than it was to the Egyptians.[347] They loved brilliant colours, but they only made use of them for what was, in fact, illumination; they coloured figures and ornaments, but they never painted, as the word is understood in all modern languages.

In our endeavours to explain how the Mesopotamian architect disguised, under a robe of gay tints, the poverty of the materials with which he was forced to work, we showed that he employed colour in two different ways, according to the place occupied in the building by the wall he had to cover.[348] In the interiors of rooms he was, in most cases, satisfied with spreading upon the plaster a coat of some pigment that could be easily renewed when it began to fade; but in those parts of the building that were exposed to the weather, and even in some rooms that were the objects of particular care, he had recourse to the solidity of enamel. We have pointed out the favourite motives both in the distemper paintings and in the kind of mosaic given by the glazed or enamelled bricks; we have yet to say what tints the enameller used and how he used them. Our coloured plates will give a better idea of this decoration than we can give in words (Plates XIII., XIV., and XV.).[349]

In the carpets still woven in Asia Minor, Kurdistan, Khorassan and Persia there are colours at once brilliant and soft that are a constant delight to the eye of the connoisseur. We may point, for instance, to certain reds and greens at which the manufacturers of Europe gaze in despair, in spite of the resources of modern chemistry. This freshness and solidity of tint is explained by the almost exclusive use of vegetable dyes. These the Kurd or Turkoman extracts from mountain plants, sometimes from the stem or the root, sometimes from the blossom or the seed.[350] These inventions and recipes have been handed down from generation to generation through many ages; the secret of many dyes must have been discovered long before the fall of Nineveh or the beginning of the Babylonian decadence. Down to the very last days of antiquity the dyers of Mesopotamia were famous for their processes and the harmonious splendour of their colours. Since the days of Nebuchadnezzar the people of that region have forgotten much, while they have learnt nothing, perhaps, but how to hasten the depopulation of their country by the use of gunpowder. All the professional skill and creative activity of which they still can boast they owe to the survival of this ancient industry, whose traditions and practical methods are preserved in the hut of the mountaineer, under the tent of the nomad, and in those bazaars where so many agile weavers repeat, with marvellous rapidity of hand and sureness of eye, the designs and motives of thirty or forty centuries ago.

Among the colouring materials still in use in the woollen fabrics of the Levant there can be very few with which the ancients were not acquainted, and perhaps they used some of them in their distemper paintings; but the latter were no more than feeble shadows when discovered, and they soon vanished when exposed to the air. It was different with those that had been subjected to the action of fire. They could be removed and analyzed. But the enameller confined himself almost exclusively to mineral colours, of which alone we can now describe the composition.

The two colours most frequently used were blue and yellow. Backgrounds were nearly always blue (Plates XIII. and XV.), and most of the figures yellow. Certain details were reinforced by touches of black and white. In the brick representing the king followed by his servants (Plate XIV., Fig. 1), the royal tiara is white, the hair, beards, bows, and sandals are black. Red only appears in a few ornamental details (Ibid., Fig. 2). Green is still more rare. It has been found at Khorsabad. In a fragment of painting upon stucco it affords the ground against which the figures are relieved;[351] and in the enamelled brick decoration on the harem wall (Vol. I., Fig. 101), it is used for the foliage of a tree that looks at first sight like an orange tree; its leaves however are rather those of an apple (see Plate XV., Fig. 3).

According to Sir H. Layard, the blue which was spread in such great quantities on the enamelled bricks was given by an oxide of copper mixed with a little lead, the latter metal being introduced in order to render the mixture more fusible.[352] This analysis applies only to the bricks of Nimroud. In the Sargonid period another process, borrowed, perhaps, from Egypt, seems to have been employed. Place tells us that in the course of his excavations he found two blocks of colour in one of the offices at Khorsabad. One of these blocks, weighing some two pounds and a little over, was blue. An artist was at the time engaged in copying in water-colours the decoration of one of the walls covered with enamelled bricks. In order to get as near as possible to the tint of the original the notion occurred to him to make use of the Assyrian blue. But the latter was stubborn and would not mix; it left a vitreous deposit at the bottom of the cup. At first it was supposed that its long sojourn in the earth had deprived it of some of its qualities, but later analysis explained the difficulty in a more satisfactory manner. Its unfitness for use as water-colour was not the result of any alteration. Being intended for use as a glaze or enamel upon pottery, it was composed of lapis-lazuli reduced to powder.[353]

The Chaldæans made a wide use of lapis, which they imported from central Asia. The fatherland of that mineral is the region now called Badakshan, in Bactriana, whence, in ancient times, came what Theophrastus calls the Scythian stone. The caravans brought it into the upper valley of the Tigris, whence it made its way to Babylon and even as far as Egypt. The inscriptions of Thothmes III. mention the good khesbet of Babylon among the objects offered to Pharaoh by the Rotennou, or people of Syria.[354]

This fine lapis-powder, intimately united with the clay by firing, gave a solid enamel of a very pure colour. If mixed with a body of some consistence it might be used upon the sculptures; perhaps the blue with which certain accessories were tinted was thus obtained.

The yellow is an antimoniate of lead containing a certain quantity of tin; its composition is the same as that of the pigment now called Naples yellow.[355] White is an oxide of tin, so that the Arabs do not deserve the credit they have long enjoyed of being the first, about the ninth century a.d., to make use of white so composed.[356] The black is perhaps an animal pigment.[357] The green may have been obtained by a mixture of blue and yellow pigments, of ochre with oxide of copper, for instance. As for red, no colour is easier to get. The Nimroud enamellers used, perhaps, a sub-oxide of copper,[358] while those of Khorsabad employed the iron oxide of which our red chalk is composed.[359] We can examine the latter at our ease. The cake of red found by Place weighed some five-and-forty pounds. It dissolves readily in water.

The whole palette consisted, then, of some five or six colours, and their composition was so simple that no attempt to produce an appearance of reality by their aid could have been successful. Taken altogether, the painting of Mesopotamia was purely decorative; its ornamental purpose was never for a moment lost sight of, and the forms it borrowed from the organic world always had a peculiar character. When the figures of men and animals were introduced they were never shown engaged in some action which might of itself excite the curiosity of the spectator; their forms are not studied with the religious care that proves the artist to have been impelled by their own beauty and grace of movement to give them a place in his work. There are no shadows marking the succession of planes; in the choice of flat tints the artist has not allowed himself to be tied down to fact. Thus we find that in the kind of frieze of which we give a fragment at the foot of our Plate XIV. there is a blue bull, the hoofs and the end of the tail alone being black. Upon the plinth from the Khorsabad harem, a lion, a bird, a bull, a tree, and a plough are all yellow, without change of tint (Plate XV.) In the glazed brick on which a subject so often treated by the sculptors is represented (Plate XIV., Fig. 1), the painter has tried to compose a kind of picture, but even there the colours are frankly conventional. The flesh and the robes with their ornaments are all carried out in different shades of yellow. He makes no attempt to imitate the real colours of nature; all he cares about is to please the eye and to vary the monotony of the wide surfaces left unbroken by the architect. The winged genii and the fantastic animals could be used for such a purpose no less than the fret and the palmette, but as soon as they were so employed they become pure ornament. In a decoration like that of the archivolts at Khorsabad (Vol. I., Fig. 124), the great rosettes have the same value and brilliancy of tone as the figures by which they are separated; the whiteness of their petals may even give them a greater importance and more power to attract the eye of the spectator than the figures with their yellow draperies.

If the Ninevite bricks had never been recovered, we should have been in danger of being led into error by the expressions employed by Ctesias in describing the pictures he saw at Babylon, on the walls of the royal city: “One saw there,” he says, “every kind of animal, whose images were impressed on the brick while still unburnt; these figures imitated nature by the use of colour.”[360] We cannot say whether the words we have italicised belong to the text of Ctesias, or whether they were added by Diodorus to round off the phrase. It is certain that they give a false notion of the painted decorations. Those to whom the latter were intrusted no more thought of imitating the real colours of nature than the artists to whom we owe the glazed tiles of the Turkish and Persian mosques. The latter, indeed, gave no place in their scheme of ornament to the figures either of men or animals, and in that they showed, perhaps, a finer taste. The lions and bulls of the friezes had no doubt their effect, but yet our intelligence receives some little shock in finding them deprived of their true colours, and presented to our eyes in a kind of travesty of their real selves. Things used as ornaments have no inalienable colour of their own; the decorative artist is free to twist his lines and vary his tints as he pleases; his work will be judged by the result, and so long as that is harmonious and pleasing to the eye nothing more is required. We are tempted, therefore, on the whole, to consider some of those slabs of faïence upon which nothing appears but certain ornamental lines and combinations, suggested by geometrical and vegetable forms but elaborated by his own unaided fancy, as the masterpieces of the Assyrian enameller. If he had resolutely persevered in this path he might perhaps have produced something worthy to be compared for grace and variety with the marvellous faïence of Persia.