Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/422

$4 A History of Art in Chald.ka and Assyria. rival, and the real cause of his inferiority, as we have already explained, is to be looked for in the defects of the only material in which his conceptions could be carried out. That material was brick, brick either burnt in the kiln, or dried in the sun, with which any conception may be realized but one in which delicate mouldings and slender columns play a conspicuous part. In the case of sculpture the balance hangs about level. The two schools rendered living forms, and especially those of mankind, in different ways, but their merits have seemed to us to be distinct rather than very unequal. In one we have found a more delicate feeling for line, for grace and refinement of contour ; in the minutest statuettes as in the most gigantic colossi, we have tasted the charm of that proud and smiling serenity that is expressed as much in attitude and gesture as in the face. In the other we are chiefly struck by energy of modelling and power of movement. We have estimated these qualities of force and vigour at their full price, and we have pointed out that the form of man occupies a far more important place in the religious art of Chaldsea than in that of Egypt. In its more frankly anthropomorphic character it has seemed to us an advance upon that Egyptian sculpture which put the heads of crocodiles, hawks and hippopotamuses on the shoulders of its gods. And yet we have been obliged to acknowledge that the natural conditions were in some respects unfavourable to the development of Chaldaeo-Assyrian art. Their funerary rites did not demand the absolute fidelity which made the early Egyptian sculptors such admirable portraitists. In the absence of such compulsion the Mesopotamian sculptors created general types rather than individual figures, and their art always had a more or less conventional character in consequence. Its progress was also hindered by the barrier of opaque drapery that was interposed between the artist and his model. In his figures of animals we may see how great his genius for the expression of life, form, and movement really was, and in all imitative qualities they leave his figures of men far behind. Nothing in the world can make up for the absence of that patient study of the nude, on which all really great sculpture is founded. It is because Mesopotamian art never studied at this elementary school, and never mastered these foundations of all plastic skill, that such of its productions as border on what we call the