Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/319

Characteristics of Chald.eo-Assyrian Sculpture. 287 routine. It is only when he has to represent animals that he seems to work from the living model. The human body, hidden under its long and heavy robes, did not discover enough to awake his interest ; all that he sees — the features and the profile of the face, the throat, the lower parts of the arms and legs — he treats after the examples left to him by his Chaldsean leader. In the whole of Assyrian sculpture there is no passage studied from nature with faith and sincerity, like the hand, the shoulder, and the back in the statues of Gudea. The Chaldaean sculptor had a taste for strong modelling, and in this his Assyrian pupil copied him with such an excess of zeal that he arrived at exaggeration and pure convention. He knotted the knees of his figures, he gave them knee-caps standing out like huge bosses, and muscles so stretched and salient that they look like cables rather than flesh and blood. It is an early edition of what is now an old story. The master is betrayed by the pupil, who copies his mannerisms rather than his beauties and turns many of his fine qualities into defects. We may now see how much the Chaldaean excavations and the collection which the Louvre owes to M. de Sarzec are calculated to teach the historian of art. These discoveries, by their intrinsic importance and by the light they have thrown on the origin of a great civilization, may almost be compared to those of Lepsius and Mariette, to the systematic researches and happy finds that have revealed the Egypt of the ancient empire to us. Assyrian art is no longer a puzzling phenomenon. Like the Egyptian art of the Theban epoch, it was preceded by a realistic and naturalistic, an inquisitive, simple-minded, and single-hearted art, which had faithfully studied the human form and had thus created one of the original styles of antiquity, a style, perhaps, in which Greece at its first beginning found the most useful lessons and the most fertile suggestions. As we have already confessed, we can form but a very im- perfect notion of what the art of Chaldaea was in its best days, in its period of youth and freshness. The remains are few and small ; they are heads separated from the bodies to which they once belonged, chips from broken reliefs and a few small bronze and terra-cotta statuettes. Even supposing that new discoveries come to fill up the gaps, so that the development of Chaldaeo- Assyrian art may be embraced as a whole, even then it would,