Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/203

Chald/Ean Sculpture. 173 also to the artists of the double valley that the early ceramists and modellers of Greece owed not a few of the motives they transmitted to the great periods of classic art, and, through the latter, to the art of the Renaissance and of our own day. § 5. Chaldœan Sculpture. So far we have made no distinction between Chaldaean and Assyrian sculpture. They made, in fact, but one art. In both countries we find the same themes and the same treatment — the same way of looking at nature and the same conventional methods of interpreting it. The common characteristics are numerous enough to justify us in attributing to one and the same school the works produced both in the southern and northern provinces. If we take them en bloc, and put them side by side with the productions of any other great nation of antiquity, we shall be at once struck by the close resemblance between all the monu- ments from the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, whether they come from Sirtella or Babylon, Calah or Nineveh. The con- noisseur can point out a Mesopotamian creation at a glance, mingled with works from Egypt, Phoenicia, or Greece though it may be. In order to define the Chaldaeo-Assyrian style, he may take the first object that comes to hand, without caring much whether it come from the upper country or the neighbourhood of the Persian Gulf. And yet between those cities of primitive Chaldsea that almost rivalled Memphis in age, and the towns of Assyria which only commenced to flourish in centuries that we may almost call modern, it is impossible that the spirit of the plastic arts and their executive processes can have remained without change. Between the earliest and the latest monuments, between the images of Gudea and those of Assurbanipal, there are, at least, shades of difference. It is certain that the old Chaldaean art and the art of Assyria were not two different arts, but they were two suc- cessive movements of the same art — two phases in its develop- ment. We have still to distinguish between these two phases by studying, one after the other, the history of Chaldaean and that of Assyrian sculpture.