Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/164

38 A History of Art in Chald.ea and Assyria. was a race in the proper sense of the word ; it was homogeneous and pure-blooded. Between one member and another of the aristocracy that reigned and fought, these two features would vary little. All their noses were more or less aquiline, all or nearly all their eyes large and black. The national fashion of wearing the hair would suppress many of the characteristics by which we know one man from another. From all this it results that the crowd of kings and nobles who furnished the sculptor with his favourite theme are vastly like each other. This similarity or rather uniformity was ill calculated to awaken the sense of portraiture in the artist. The features that distinguished one king from another are slurred over by the sculptor simply because they were in reality so lightly marked that he hardly perceived their existence. We know that this opinion is not shared by all those who have busied themselves with the Assyrian monuments. It has been said and, in the belief of some, proof has been given, that we possess the elements of an Assyrian iconography, that the images of the kings, in the steles and on the palace walls, are true and faithful portraits. 1 We believe this to be a mistake. No doubt the proportions of the body, the expression of the face, and the general lines of the profile, are not the same for Assurnazirpal, Sargon, and the sons and grandsons of that prince. But what must we conclude from that ? Only that Assyria did not escape, any more than Egypt, from the action of that law of change which is the very condition of life ; that from one century and one reign to another the taste and execution of the Assyrian sculptors were modified, though in a very feeble degree. Thus figures are shorter and more thickset in the north-western palace at Nimroud than at Khorsabad or Kouyundjik ; they are finer in their proportions, more graceful, and altogether better in their art under Assurbanipal than under his grandfather, the founder of the dynasty. Art, as we shall bring abundant evidence to prove, followed the same path at Nineveh as everywhere else. This is not to be denied ; but before the hypothesis against which we contend can be accepted, its advocates must show that, in each 1 This is the opinion of M. Lenormant {Gazette des Beaux Arts, vol. xxv. pp. 218-225), and M. Menant has upheld the same thesis in a paper read before the Académie des Inscriptions {Remarques sur des Portraits des Rois Assyro-Chald'eens, in the Comptes Rendus for 188 1, pp. 254-267).