Fig. 140.—Stag upon a palmette; from Layard.
Fig. 141.—Winged bull upon a rosette; from Layard.
If, not content with this general view of Assyrian decoration, we enter into it in detail, we shall find its economy most judiciously arranged and understood. When the sculptor set himself to carve the slabs that enframe a door or those that protect the lower parts of a wall, he sought to render what he saw or imagined as precisely and definitely as possible. He went to nature for inspiration even when he carved imaginary beings, and copied her, in fragments perhaps, but with a loyal and vigorous sincerity. Everywhere, except in certain pictures with a strictly limited function, he obeyed an imagination over which a sure judgment kept unsleeping watch. His polychromatic decorations fulfilled their purpose of amusing and delighting the eye without ever attempting to deceive it. Such is and must always be the true principle of ornament, and the decorators of the great buildings of Babylon and Nineveh seem to have thoroughly understood that it was so; their rich and fertile fancy is governed, in every instance to which we can point, with unfailing tact, and to them must be given the credit of having invented not a few of the motives that may yet be traced in the art of the Medes and Persians, in that of the Syrians, the Phœnicians, the peoples of Asia Minor, and above all in that of the Greeks—those unrivalled masters who gave immortality to every artistic combination that they chose to adopt.
Fig. 142.—Stag, palmette, and rosette; from Layard.
NOTES