Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/97

Themes of Chald/EO-Assyrian Sculpture. 79 to this that stone was rare and dear, that it had to be brought from a great distance, and we shall comprehend why funerary rites and the worship of the dead exercised no appreciable influence over Chaldaean sculpture. Here the beginnings of art are more obscure than in Egypt. In the first place we cannot trace them back nearly so far, in the second both statues and bas-reliefs are much less numerous. In spite of recent discoveries, to which we owe much, Egypt still remains unrivalled both by the prodigious antiquity into whose depths she allows us to catch a glimpse, and by the ever-increasing multitude of monuments and tombs that are found in her soil. The night that hides the birth of civilization is darker in Mesopotamia than in the Nile valley ; it does not allow us to perceive how the plastic faculty was first awakened, and why it took one direction more than another ; we cannot tell why the modeller of Lower Chaldaea set himself to handle clay, or carve wood and stone into the shape of some real or fantastic creature. On the other hand, when we study Chaldaean sculpture in the oldest of those works that have come down to us, we are struck by the fact that, even in the remote centuries to which those carvings belong, Chaldaean art interested itself in all the aspects of nature and in every variety of living form. It had nevertheless its favourite themes, namely, the represen- tations of royal and divine personages. When first called upon to suggest the ideas of divine power and perfection, art had no other resource but to borrow features and characteristics from those mortal forms that must always, in one point or another, seem incomplete and unfinished. Of all undertakings that could be proposed to it, this was at once the most noble and the most difficult. To find a real solution of the problem we must turn to the Greeks. Of all ancient peoples they were the first to perceive the unrivalled nobilitv of the human form ; they were the first to decide that the notion of divine superiority, of a divine principle, could be best suggested in all its infinite varieties, through that form. We shall see them obtain the results at which they aimed by giving to man's body and features a charm, a grandeur, a purity of line — in a word, a perfection, to which no single living member of the race can attain. The Chaldseans had no suffi- ciently clear idea of such a system, and, more especially, they