Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/144

1 26 A History of Art in Ciiald.ka and Assyria. played, but the idea of detaching them altogether from the background and giving them an independent existence of their own, was soon abandoned. Under the first Chaldsean empire, real statues, round which we can walk, were modelled (see Plates VI. and VII.). In several of these, although the forms are not so round as in nature, the back is as carefully treated as the front. On the other hand, the few Assyrian statues that have come down to us are all too thin from front to back, while their backs are hardly more than roughly-dressed stone. You feel at once that they were made to stand against a wall, and you think of children and of those whose limbs are so infirm that they cannot stand without support. Before such things, we are far enough, not only from the grace, vitality, and freedom of the Greeks, but even from the proud repose of the Egyptian colossi. Although our figures show, of course, only the front view, this impression is very striking in the statues of Nebo (Vol. I. Fig. 15) and Assurnazirpal (Fig. 60), which have migrated from Nimroud to the British Museum. The latter was found by Layard at the entrance of one of the temples whose plans we have given (Vol. I. Fig. 189). It is cut from a very hard and close-grained limestone, and stands upon a pedestal that is nothing but another block of the same material. We have been compelled, in order to keep our figure sufficiently large, to reduce this block to the dimensions of a shallow plinth. In reality it is a cube thirty-one inches high and twenty-one and three-quarter inches wide. 1 The statues of Nebo and Assurnazirpal are standing figures, but, at Kaleh-Shergat, Layard found a seated figure of Shalmaneser II. (Fig. 61). 2 It is in black basalt and has no 1 Layard, Discoveries, p. 361. The same characteristics may be recognized in the alabaster statues found by Place in one of the harem courts at Khorsabad (Ninive, vol. i. pp. 122-125, an( ^ voL l ^ L plate 31, bis.). They are shown on a small scale in our fig. 197 (vol. i.). We may see that they were set with their backs against a wall, and that they carried a cushion on their heads, on which we have placed a vase of flowers. These statues were drowned in the Tigris ! 2 We may also quote the following monuments as examples of Assyrian statues : 1. The fragment of a seated statue found at "Kaleh-Shergat, which we figure on page 127 (Layard, Nineveh, vol. ii. pp. 51-52). 2. The head of a statue of Istar, discovered at Kouyundjik (Smith, Assyrian Discoveries, pp. 248 and 430). This head is about nine inches high. 3. Fragment of a colossal statue of shelly lime- stone, found in the same place by the same explorer {ibid. p. 430). It consists only of a part of the left shoulder. There is an inscription on the back tracing the descent of Assurbanipal from S'argon. 2 Layard, Nineveh, vol. ii. p. 52.