A few traces of colour may still be discovered upon some of Sargon’s sculptures in the Louvre and upon those of Assurnazirpal in the British Museum.[286] I could find no remains of colour either upon the reliefs of Assurbanipal or upon those of Sennacherib, where, moreover, Layard tells us he could discover none.[287]
It would be very strange however, if in these palaces of the last of the Sargonids the decorator had deliberately renounced the beauties of that discreet system of polychromy of which the traces are to be found in all the earlier palaces. It is possible that these touches of colour were reserved for the last when the palaces were erected, and that something may have happened to prevent them from being placed on the sculptures of these two sovereigns.
So far as we can discover, no trace of colour has been found on any of the arched steles or isolated statues left to us by Chaldæa and Assyria. This abstention is to be explained by the nature of the materials at the disposal of the sculptor in Chaldæa, the cradle of his art. These were chiefly igneous rocks, very hard, very close in grain and dark in colour, and susceptible of a very high polish. The existence of such a polish disposes of any idea that the figures to which it was given were ever painted. The pigment would not have stayed long on such a surface, and besides, the reds and blues known to the Ninevite artists would have had a very poor effect on a blue-black ground.
On the other hand, when they set to work to model in clay the Assyrians could give free rein to their love for colour. Most of the statuettes found in the ruins of their palaces had been covered with a single uniform tint, which, thanks to the porous nature of the material, is still in fair preservation. The tint varies between one figure and another, and, as they are mostly figures of gods or demons, the idea has been suggested that their colours are emblematic.[288] Thus the Louvre possesses a statuette from Khorsabad representing a god crowned with a double-horned tiara, and covered all over, flesh and drapery alike, with an azure blue.[289] A demon with the head of a carnivorous animal, from the same place, is painted black, a colour that seems to suggest a malevolent being walking in the night and dwelling in subterranean regions.[290]
The Assyrians also made use of what has been sometimes called natural polychromy, that is to say they introduced different materials into the composition of a single figure, each having a colour of its own and being used to suggest a similar tint in the object represented. Several fragments of this kind may be seen in the cases of the British Museum.[291] We may give as examples some eyes in black marble; the ball itself is ivory while the pupil and iris are of blue paste, a sandy frit in which the colour sank deeply before firing. Beards and hair were also made of this material; they have been found in several instances, without the heads to which they belonged. In the ruins from which he took these objects, Layard saw arms, legs and torsos of wood. They were so completely carbonized by fire that they could not be removed; at the least touch they crumbled into powder.
With wood, with enamel and coloured earths, with stones, both soft and hard, and metals both common, like bronze, and precious, like gold and silver, the sculptor built up statues and statuettes in which the peculiar beauty to be attained by the juxtaposition of such heterogeneous materials, was steadily kept in view. With inferior taste and less feeling for purity of form than the Greeks, this art was identical in principal with the chryselephantine sculpture that created the Olympian Zeus and the Athene of the Parthenon.
The idea that sculpture is the art in which form is treated to the exclusion of colour is quite a modern one.[292] The sculptor of Assyria was as ready to mix colour with his contours as his confrère of Egypt, but he made use of it in more sober and reserved fashion. How are we to explain the difference? It is easier to prove the fact than to give a reason for it. It may be said that the sunlight is less constant and less blinding in Mesopotamia than in the Nile valley, and that the artist was not called upon to struggle with such determination, by the profusion and brightness of his colours, against the devouring illumination that impoverishes outlines and obliterates modelling. We must also bear in mind the habits formed by work in such materials as basalt and diorite, which did not lend themselves kindly to the use of bright colours.
In any case the fact itself seems incontestable. We cannot say of the Ninevite reliefs as we said of those of Thebes, that they resembled a brilliant tapestry stretched over the flat wall-surfaces. If, in most of the buildings, touches of paint freely placed upon the accessories and even upon the figures and faces, lightened and varied the general appearance of the sculptures, still the naked stone was left to show all over the bed and over the greater part of the figures. From this we must not conclude, however, that the Assyrians and Chaldæans did not possess, and possess in a very high degree, the love for bold and brilliant colour-schemes which even now distinguishes their degenerate posterity, the races inhabiting the Euphrates valley and the plateau of Iran. But they gratified their innate and hereditary taste in a different way. It was to their woven stuffs, to their paintings in distemper and their enamelled faïence that the buildings of Mesopotamia owed that gaiety of appearance which has led us to compare them with the mosques of Turkey and Persia.
§ 8.—Gems.
“Every Babylonian had a seal,” says Herodotus;[293] this fact seems to have struck him directly he began to explore the streets and bazaars of the great oriental city. These seals, which appear to have attracted the eye of the historian by the open manner in which they were carried and the continual use made of them in every transaction of life, public or private, are now in our museums. They are to be found in hundreds in all the galleries and private collections of Europe.[294]