Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/126

ioS A History of Art in Chald.ea and Assyria. 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 pre- vents us from reproducing one of those pictures in which the triumphs of Sennacherib are commemorated, 1 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 enjoy- ment 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 attrac- tion, 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 inci- dents, 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 cortege with two processions taken from the palace of Sennacherib, the grooms leading horses, and servants carrying fruits and other comestibles (Monuments, 2nd series, plates 7-9), and the triumphal march of the Assyrian army with its chariots {ib. plates 47-49)- 1 L , yard, Monuments^ 2nd series, plates 45 and 46.