Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/119

Themes of Chald/EO-Assyrian Sculpture. ioi 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. 1 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 aesthetic 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, w r ere less works of art than records. 2 1 We have refrained from giving a reproduction of this fragment on account of its bad condition. Its surface is rough ; it lacks the head, the fore-arms and the fore-parts of the feet. The material is a coarse limestone. The height of the fragment is thirty-eight inches. 2 No people that have ever lived have been more solicitous than the Assyrians to transmit the remembrance of their exploits to posterity. We thus find that many of their sculptured slabs had their posterior faces, those that were turned to the wall, also covered with inscriptions.