Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/431

Comparison between Egypt and Chald^ea. 393 in the round. No suspicion of the wealth of suggestion latent especially in the latter, seems to have dawned upon the Assyrian mind. If we except a few terra-cotta statuettes, the artist who in some way gave proof of so much resource, of so much skill and ingenuity, seems never to have felt the charm of female beauty. The beauty of woman is the light of nature, the perennial joy of the eye ; to exclude it from the ideal world created by the plastic arts is to condemn that world to a perpetual twilight, to cast over it a veil of chill monotony and sadness. In the arts of all those peoples who received the teachings of Egypt and Chaldaea, whether at first hand, like the Phoenicians, or at second, like the Greeks, the two distinct influences can always be traced. Mesopotamia may be recognized in certain ornamental motives, such as the " knop and flower," the rosettes and palmettes, as well as in its taste for the symmetry given by coupled figures ; still more clearly is it betrayed in motives into which lions and the whole tribe of fantastic animals are introduced, struggling with and devouring each other, and occasionally brought to the ground by some individual dressed in a long gaberdine and crowned with a tiara. On the other hand, it is to Egypt that our thoughts are turned when the human body meets our eyes in its unveiled nobility, with all the variety of attitude and outline its forms imply. The peoples of Western Asia learnt much in the school of the Chaldaean artist, but the teaching given by the Egyptian sculptor was of a higher order, and far better adapted to guide them in the way that leads to those exquisite creations in which delicacy and certainty of hand are happily allied with imaginative power. Sooner or later such teaching must have aroused, in open and inquiring minds, a feeling for beauty like that felt in her peculiar fashion by Egypt, a feeling to which Greece, when once put in her right way, gave the fullest expression it has ever received in marble and bronze. In order to make good a comparison that no historian of art can avoid, we have placed ourselves successively at two different points of view, and from both we have arrived at the same result : as artists the Egyptians take a higher rank than the Assyrians, than those constructors who obstinately neglected the column even when they built with stone, than those sculptors who avoided vol. ii. 1 E