A history of art in Chaldæa & Assyria, Vol. 2 (of 2)

by Georges Perrot; Charles Chipiez

§ 7.—Polychromy.

We have now studied Mesopotamian sculpture in its favourite themes, in its principal conventions, and in the fluctuations of its taste and methods of work; we have yet to ask whether this sculpture, which differed in so many ways from the plastic art of Egypt, differed from it also in absence of colour. We have put off this question until now, because we had first to determine what materials the architect and sculptor employed, how they employed them, and what part was played by figures in relief and in the round in the architectonic creations of Chaldæa and Assyria.

In speaking of Egypt we have explained how a brilliant light destroys the apparent modelling of objects, how, by the reflections it casts into the shadows, it interferes with our power to distinguish one distant plane from another.[273] In every country where a vertical sun shines in an unclouded sky, the decorator has had to invoke the help of colour against the violence of the light, has had to accept its aid in strengthening his contours, and in making his figures and ornaments stand out against their ground. In describing Egyptian polychromy we said that we should find the same tendency among other nations, different in character and origin, but subjected to the influence of similar surroundings. We also allowed it to be seen that we should have to notice many changes of fashion in this employment of colour. Colour played a different and more important part in one place or period than in another, and it is not always easy to specify the causes of the difference. In the Egyptian monuments hardly a square inch of surface can be found over which the painter has not drawn his brush; elsewhere, in Greece for instance, we shall find him more discreet, and his artificial tints restricted to certain well-defined parts of a figure or building.

Did Assyria follow the teaching of Egypt, or did she strike out a line of her own, and set an example of the reserve that was afterwards to find favour in Greece? That is the question to be answered. Before we can do so we must produce and compare the evidence brought forward by Botta, Layard, Place and others, who saw the Assyrian sculptures reappear in the light of day. Ever since those sculptures were recovered they have been exposed to the air; they have undergone all the handling and rubbing involved in a voyage to Europe; and for the last twenty or thirty years they have been subjected to the dampness of our climate. We need, then, feel no surprise that traces of colour still visible when the pick-axe of the explorer freed the alabaster slabs from their envelope of earth have now disappeared.

Before examining our chief witnesses, the men who dug up Khorsabad, and Nimroud, and Kouyundjik, we may, to some extent, foretell their answers. We have already explained how the Mesopotamian architect made use of colour to mask the poverty of his construction and to furnish the great bare walls of his clay buildings. Both inside and outside, the Assyrian palaces had the upper parts of their walls and the archivolts of their doors decorated with enamelled bricks or paintings in distemper. Is it to be supposed that where the reliefs began all artificial tinting left off, and that the eye had nothing but the dull grey of gypsum and limestone to wander to from the rich dyes of the carpets with which the floors were strewn? Nothing could well be more disagreeable than such a contrast. In our own day, and over the whole of the vast continent that stretches from China to Asia Minor, there is not a stuff, however humble, that is woven on the loom or embroidered by the needle, but betrays an instinctive feeling for harmony so true and subtle that every artist wonders at it, and the most tasteful of our art workmen despair of reaching its perfection, and yet many of these faultless harmonies were conceived and realized in the tent of the nomad shepherd. We can hardly believe that in the palace where official art lavished all its resources in honour of its master, there could be any part from which the gaiety that colour gives was entirely excluded, especially if it was exactly the part to which the eye of every visitor would be most surely attracted.

Before going into the question of evidence one might, therefore, make up our minds that the Assyrian architect never allowed any such element of failure to be introduced into his work; and the excavations have made that conclusion certain. The Assyrian reliefs were coloured, but they were not coloured all over like those of Egypt; the grain of the stone did not disappear, from one end of the frieze to the other, under a layer of painted stucco. Flandin, the draughtsman attached to the expedition of M. Botta, alone speaks of a coat of ochre spread over the bed of the relief and over the nude portions of the figures;[274] he confesses, however, that the traces were very slight and that they occurred only on a slab here and there. Botta, who saw the same slabs, thought his colleague mistaken.[275] Place is no less decided: “None of us,” he says, “could find any traces of paint upon the undraped portions of the figures, and it would be very extraordinary if among so many bare arms and bare legs, to say nothing of faces, not one should have retained any vestige of colour if they had all once been painted.”[276] We might be inclined to ask whether the traces of pigment that have been noticed here and there upon the alabaster might not have been the remains of a more widespread coloration, the rest of which had disappeared. Strong in his experience, Place thus answers any doubts that might be expressed on this point: “We never found an ornament, a weapon, a shoe or sandal, partially coloured; they were either coloured all over or left bare, while objects in close proximity were without any hue but their own. Sometimes eyes and eyebrows were painted, while hair and beard were left untouched; sometimes the tiara with which a figure was crowned or the fan it carried in its hand was painted while the hand itself and the hair that curled about the head showed not the slightest trace of such an operation; elsewhere colour was only to be found on a baldrick, on sandals, or the fringes of a robe.” Wherever these colours existed at all they were so fresh and brilliant at the time of discovery that no one thought of explaining their absence from certain parts of the work by the destruction of the pigment. “How is it,” continues Place, “that, if robes were painted all over, we only found colour on certain accessories, on fringes and embroideries? How is it that if the winged bulls were coated in paint from head to foot, not one of the deep grooves in their curled beards and hair has preserved the slightest vestige of colour, while the white and black of their eyes, which are salient rather than hollowed, remain intact? Finally, we may mention the following purely accidental, and therefore all the more significant, fact: a smudge of black paint, some two feet long, was still clearly visible on the breast of one of the colossi in the doorway of room 19.[277] How can we account for the persistence of this smudge, which must have fallen upon the monster’s breast while they were painting its hair, if we are to suppose that the whole of its body was covered with a tint which has disappeared and left no sign?”

Such evidence is decisive. The colouring of the Assyrian reliefs must always have been partial. The sculptor employed the painter merely to give a few strokes of the brush which, by the frankness and vivacity of their accent, should bring the frieze into harmony with the wall that enframed it. Nothing more was required to destroy the dull monotony of the long band of stone. At the same time these touches of colour helped to draw attention to certain details upon which the sculptor wished to insist.

For all this, four colours were enough. Observers agree in saying that black, white, red and blue made up the whole palette.[278] These tints were everywhere employed pretty much in the same fashion.[279]

In those figures in which drapery covered all but the head, the latter was, of course, more important than ever. The artist therefore set himself to work to increase its effect as much as he could. He painted the eyeball white, the pupil and iris, the eyebrows, the hair and the beard, black; sometimes the edges of the eyelids were defined with the same colour. The band about the head of the king or vizier is often coloured red, as well as the rosettes which in other figures sometimes decorate the royal tiara. The same tint is used upon fringes, baldricks, sandals, earrings, parasols and fly-flappers, sceptres, the harness of horses and the ornamental studs or bosses with which it was covered, and the points of weapons.[280] In some instances blue is substituted for red in these details. Place speaks of a fragment lost in the Tigris on which the colours were more brilliant than usual; upon it the king held a fan of peacock’s feathers coloured with the brightest mineral blue.[281]

When figures held a flower in their hands it was blue, and at Khorsabad a bird on the wing was covered with the same tint.[282] In some bas-reliefs red and blue alternate in the sandals of the figures and harness of the horses.[283] We find a red bow with a blue quiver.[284] The flames of towns taken and set on fire by the Assyrians were coloured red in many of the Khorsabad reliefs.[285]