Fig. 86.—Deer hunt. Bas-relief from Khorsabad (after Place).
In the time of Assurbanipal, a more natural art, and one which conformed more to the true principles of sculpture in bas-relief, came into being. Instead of giants, we find on the contrary small figures forming a series of pictures, containing the greatest variety of scene, and full of freshness and action. This art reaches its apogee in the figure of the lioness which we have cited ([fig. 81]). It must be added that all the parts of the same bas-relief are seldom sculptured by the same artist, and that figures of very unequal merit are met with. The master’s chisel reserved for itself the principal personages, the royal train and the officers who surrounded it; the disciples worked at the secondary portions, the corpses of the enemy, the processions of prisoners, the background of the landscape. Matters were not managed differently with regard to the sculptures of the Parthenon.
§ III. Painting and Enamelling.
The bricks which composed the structure of the walls in Chaldæan or Assyrian edifices were nowhere visible. Above the slabs sculptured in bas-relief and under the spring of the vaults a white stucco was applied, made of plaster and lime, like that still used by the Orientals to coat their houses; this custom explains the phrase “whited sepulchres” in the Gospels. It was doubtless on a plaster of this nature that the mysterious hand of which the Book of Daniel speaks traced out Belshazzar’s sentence of condemnation on the night of the ill-famed banquet: the sacred writer says that the hand wrote “on the plaster of the wall.” This stucco was often decorated with paintings in distemper, at any rate in the principal chambers, above the line of the bas-reliefs.
Modern explorers have collected some fragments of these frescoes or decorative paintings; at Warka, among the ruins of the temple called Wuswas, Loftus acquired some which belong to the remotest Chaldæan period. At Khorsabad, V. Place found on some pieces of stucco elegant rosettes formed by the application and juxtaposition of very decided colours: white, yellow, green, red, and black. One of the most remarkable examples of this painting is a border of bulls painted white on a yellow ground, their form being relieved by a broad black outline ([fig. 87]). Above is a row of blue battlements; below festoons of many colours. The effect is harmonious, though the tints are flat, and in spite of the absence of all modelling in the figures.[41]