The art of Sargon was an art of transition. While on the one hand it endeavoured to open up new ground, on the other it travelled on the old ways and followed many of the ancient errors; it had a marked predilection for figures larger than nature, and bas-reliefs treating of royal pageants and processions remind us by the simplicity of their conception of those of Assurnazirpal. We have already given many fragments (Vol I. Figs. 22–24, and 29), and now we give another, a vizier and a eunuch standing before the king in the characteristic attitude of respect (Fig. 118). The inscription which cut the figures of Assurnazirpal so awkwardly in two has disappeared; the proportions have gained in slenderness, and the muscular development, though still strongly marked, has lost some of its exaggeration. All this shows progress, and yet on the whole the Louvre relief is less happy in its effect than the best of the Nimroud sculptures in the British Museum. The execution is neither so firm nor so frank; the relief is much higher and the modelling a little heavy and bulbous in consequence. This result may also be caused to some extent by the nature of the material, which is a softer alabaster than was employed, so far as we know, in any other part of Assyria. At Nimroud a fine limestone was chiefly used.
We shall be contented with mentioning the stele of Sargon, found near Larnaca, in Cyprus, in 1845. It is most important as an historical monument; it proves that, as a sequel to his Syrian conquests, the terror of Sargon’s name was so widespread that even the inhabitants of the islands thought it prudent to declare themselves his vassals, and to set up his image as a sign of homage rendered and allegiance sworn. But the stone is now too much broken to be of any great interest as a work of art.[247]
The artistic masterpiece of this epoch is the bronze lion figured in our Plate XI. It had been suggested that its use was to hold down the cords of a tent or the lower edge of tapestries, a purpose for which the weight of the bronze and the ring fixed in its back make it well suited. This idea had to be abandoned, however, when a whole series of similar figures marked with the name of Sennacherib was found. Their execution was hardly equal to that of the lion we have figured, but their general characteristics were the same, and they had rings on their backs.[248]
These lions are sixteen in number; they form a series in which the size of the animal becomes steadily smaller with each example; the largest is a foot long, the smallest hardly more than an inch. The decrease seems to follow a certain rule, but rust has affected them too greatly for it to be easy to base any metrological calculation upon their weight. But all doubt as to their use is removed by the inscriptions in cuneiform and in ancient Aramaic characters with which several of them are engraved. The Aramaic inscriptions all begin with the word mine; then comes a figure indicating the number of mines, or of subdivisions of the mine that the weight represents; finally, there is the name of some personage, who may perhaps have been a magistrate charged with the regulation and verification of weights.
Fig. 118.—Bas-relief from Khorsabad. Height 9 feet 5 inches. Louvre.
With the accession of Sennacherib, a sensible change comes over the aspect of the reliefs. What until now has been the exception becomes the rule. On almost every slab we find a complex and carefully treated landscape background. The artist is not satisfied with indicating the differences between conifers, cypresses, and pines (Vol. I. Figs, 41–43), palms (ib. Figs. 30 and 34; and above, Fig. 21), the vine (Fig. 47), and the tall reeds and grasses of the marsh (Fig. 119) are also imitated.[249]
Fig. 119.—Marsh vegetation; from Layard.
We feel that the sculptor wished to reproduce all those subordinate features of nature by which his eye was amused on the Assyrian plains; he seems almost to have taken photographs from nature, and then to have transferred them to the palace walls by the aid of his patient chisel. Look, for instance, at the reliefs in which the process of building Sennacherib’s palace is narrated. The sculptor is not content with retracing, in a spirit of uncompromising reality, all the operations implied by so great an undertaking; he gives backgrounds to his pictures in which he introduces, on a smaller scale, many details that have nothing to do with the main subject of the relief. Thus we find a passage in which men are shown carting timber, and another in which they are dragging a winged bull, both surmounted by a grove of cypresses, while still higher on the slab, and, therefore, in the intention of the sculptor, on a more distant horizon, we see a river, upon which boatmen propel their clumsy vessels, and fishermen, astride on inflated skins, drift with the stream, while fishes nibble at their baited lines.[250]