Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/131

Materials. i j 3 been called sometimes a throne-room and sometimes a temple, was decorated with reliefs in basalt, 1 but the use of these hard rocks was always very rare in Assyria. The habits of the northern artists were formed in cutting the softer stones, and their use of such materials explains not only their prodigious fecundity but certain qualities and defects of their style. Both Chaldaea and Assyria made too constant and skilful use of plastic clay in their architecture for it to have been possible that they should overlook its capabilities as a material for the sculptor, especially in the production of small objects like sepulchral statuettes. Both nations have transmitted to us a vast quantity of such figures. In both cases they are solid ; those of Chaldaea are stamped in a mould in a single piece ; their reverse is flat and roughly smoothed by the hand ; the clay is fine and close-grained, and so hard and well fired that it cannot be scratched with a metal point (Fig. 50). 2 The execution of the Assyrian figures is more simple. They are solidly modelled in clay, and without the use of a mould, although we often find a series made after one pattern and giving a high idea of the Assyrian modeller's skill (Fig. 51). The coarseness of the material however is surprising ; it is a dark grey earth, unequal, knotty, without any mixture of sand, but marked with cross hatchings left by the straw with which it seems to have been mixed. The body is so friable that it crumbles in the hand, but as it resists water it must have undergone a gentle burning, 3 Examples are also to be found of objects in earthenware or terra-cotta coated with a vitreous glaze, like those that the Egyptians manufactured in such enormous quantities. 4 In these cases the figure is cast in a mould, and the enamel is either blue or green, as in Egypt (Fig. 52). 5 Clay was used for other things besides these small statuettes ; it seems to have been employed in the first sketches from which the sculptor chiselled the alabaster slabs, at least when he attacked the more important and complex groups. We can hardly refuse to 1 Place, Ninive, vol. i, p. 150, and vol. iii. plate 48, fig. 3. 2 Heuzey, Catalogue des figurines en terre cuite du musée du Louvre, vol. i. p 26. 3 Heuzey, Catalogue, &c, p. 18. 4 Art in Ancient Egypt, vol. ii. pp. 375. 5 Both the British Museum and the Louvre possess examples of this kind of work in which the handling shows the greatest freedom. VOL. II. Q