Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/222

lu: A History of Art in Ciialpta and Assyria. expression that has been sanctified by custom, and one to which the critic and historian instinctively turns ? When he seeks for a special term to denote the different phases of an organic development, what does he call the phase in which execution is at once free and informed with knowledge, when the hand of the artist, having won complete mastery over itself and over the material on which it is employed, allows him to reproduce those aspects of nature by which he has been charmed and interested ? He calls it the classic period, or the period in which works fit to be placed, as Fig. 104. — Stone pedestal ; from Tello. Greatest diameter 6 inches. Louvre. models, before the artists of future ages, were produced. If we adopt this nomenclature, the third of the periods we have just been discussing will be for us the Classic age of Chald/ka. Although the remains from Sirtella give an opportunity for the study of Chaldœan art that is to be equalled nowhere else in Europe, still the British Museum and the old collections of the Louvre contain more than one object calculated to enrich, if not to complete, the series we have established. A bronze in the former gallery (Fig. 105) seems to date from the earliest period of Chalda^an art. It has been thought to