Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/433

Comparison between Egypt and Chald^a. 395 tions, palaces like those of Nimroud and Khorsabad never quite threw off their appearance of gigantic improvisations. Their plans once determined — and Assyrian plans only varied within very narrow limits — the method of roofing, flat or vaulted, fixed upon for each apartment, all the rest was only a matter of foremen and their legions of half-skilled workmen. At the very least we may say that the architect who superintended the building of a Ninevite palace had a far easier task than his rival of Thebes or Memphis. The arrangement of porticoes and hypostyle halls demanded much thought and taste, and, if the work when finished was at all to come up to the ideas of its creator, the workmen who cut the graceful capitals and sturdy architraves from the huge masses of granite, sandstone, or limestone, had to be supervised with an unremitting care unknown and uncalled for in Meso- potamia. The architects who raised the colonnades of Karnak and the Ramesseum for Seti and his famous son, were the Ictinus and Mnesicles of the East. We may become better acquainted than we are now with the monumental history of Mesopotamia, but we shall never find within her borders artists worthy to be placed on a level with those Theban masters. And if we compare the sculptors of Thebes and Nineveh, we shall arrive at the same conclusion. On the one hand we find artists who, whether they worked for the tomb or the temple, in the most stubborn or the most kindly materials, chiselled images that either delight us with their simple truth, or impress us with their noble gravity and colossal size. A whole nation of statues issued from those Egyptian studios through which we have conducted our readers, many of them real masterpieces in their way. In Mesopotamia, after early attempts that seemed full of promise, the art of modelling statues was soon abandoned. In the glorious days of Nineveh, all that was required of the sculptor was a talent, we might say a knack, for cutting in the soft gypsum or limestone realistic illustrations of the conquests and hunts of the reigning prince. He had to turn out purely historical and anecdotic sculpture by the yard, or rather by the mile ; while in Egypt we see the whole nation, with its kings and gods, revive to a second life in those forceful and sincere portraits of which so many thousands have come down to our day.