Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/313

Characteristics of Chald.eo-Assyrian Sculpture. 281 § 9. The General Characteristics of Chaldœo- Assyrian Sculpture. We have now reached the end of our inquiry into the history of Mesopotamian sculpture — an inquiry that we have endeavoured to make as complete as the existing remains would allow. So far as Chaldaea is concerned, these are very few in number. On the other hand, the three centuries over which the Assyrian power extended are pictured in such a vast number of reliefs that we are embarrassed by their number as much as by their want of variety. Our difficulty in the case of Assyria has been to make a selection from a vast quantity of objects that tell us the same thing again and again, while, in the case of Chaldaea, it has been to insure that none of the scanty salvage from so great a wreck should be lost. We have more than once had to make induction and con- jecture take the place of examination and assertion before we could complete even a rough sketch of the development of Chaldaean art. There is one question that must have been asked by many of our readers before these pages came in their way, but is now, we venture to hope, fully answered, and that is, whether the Semites of Chaldaea drew their first inspiration from a foreign source, or whether it was an original result from the natural aptitudes of the race, Ancient as civilization may have been in the Euphrates valley, it was still more ancient, to all appearance, in the valley of the Nile. And yet all who have examined the figures we have placed before them must acknowledge the originality and inde- pendence of Chaldaean art. No ; the sculptors of Memphis and Thebes were not the masters of those of Babylon and Nineveh ; they preceded them indeed, but they left them no teaching and no models to copy. This is proved in the first place by the difference, we might say the opposition, between the two styles. The Egyptian sculptor simplifies, abridges, and summarizes form ; the Assyrian amplifies it and accents its details. The former seems to see the human body through a veil of gauze, which hides the accidents of the surface and the secondary forms, allowing nothing to be clearly grasped but the contour and the great leading lines. One would say that the second studied nature through a magnifying-glass ; he insists upon what the first slurs over. vol. 11. 00