Fig. 140.—Cylinder of black jasper. British Museum.
On examining the oldest Mesopotamian engravings on precious stones a skilled craftsman would see at once that nearly all the work had been done with only two instruments—one for the round hollows and another for the straight lines. In the designs cut with these tools we find curiously complete likenesses of the small lay figures with ball-and-socket joints used by painters. Some idea of the strange results produced by these first attempts at gem-engraving may be formed from our reproductions of two cylinders in the collection at the British Museum. The influence of the process, the tyranny of the implement, if we may use such a phrase, is conspicuous in both. Note, for instance, in the first design, which is, apparently, a scene of sacrifice (Fig. 139), how the head and shoulder of the figure on the left are each indicated by a circular hollow. The same primitive system has been used in the cylinder where the god Anou is separated from another deity by the winged globe (Fig. 140). The design is here more complex. The bodies of the two divinities and the wings of the globe are indicated by numerous vertical and horizontal grooves set close together; but the circular hollows appear not only in the globe and in the piece of furniture that occupies the foreground, but also in the knees, calves, ankles, and other parts of the two figures.
Fig. 141.—Assyrian cylinder. British Museum. Drawn by Wallet.
As time went on they learnt to use their tools with more freedom and more varied skill. We shall not attempt to follow M. Soldi in tracing the art through all its successive stages.[305] As an example of the skill to which the Mesopotamian artist had attained towards the seventh century B.C. we may quote a splendid cornelian cylinder belonging to the British Museum (Fig. 141).[306] The subject is extremely simple. In its general lines it continually recurs on the bas-reliefs and gems of the Sargonid period. A winged personage, with his arms extended, stands between two fantastic winged quadrupeds and grasps each by a fore-paw. The chief actor in the scene is very like the winged genius whom we encounter so often on the walls of the palaces (see above, Fig. 36), while both in the exaggerated modelling of the legs and in the care with which the smallest details of the costume are carried out, the special features that distinguished the sculpture of the time may be recognized. The execution is firm and significant, though a little dry and hard. It is made up of short cuts, close together; the engraver did not understand how to give his work that high polish and finish that enabled the Greeks to express the subtlest contours of the living form.
From this period onwards the artists of Mesopotamia and, in later years, those who worked for the Medes and Persians, put into use all the precious stones that were afterwards engraved by the Greeks and Romans. Their tools and processes cannot have greatly differed from those handed down by antiquity to the gem-cutters of the middle ages and the Italian renaissance. If their results were inferior to those obtained by Pyrgoteles and Dioscorides,[307] it was because oriental art never had the knowledge of the nude or the passion for beauty of form which made Greek art so original. Intaglio is only a bas-relief reversed and greatly diminished in size; the style and spirit of contemporary sculpture are reflected in it as the objects of nature are reflected in the mirror of the human eye. For want of proper tools it may lag behind sculpture, but it will never outstrip it.
The close connection between the two arts is nowhere more strongly marked than in some of the cylinders belonging to the first monarchy. Although the artist was content in most cases with mere outlines, he now and then lavished more time and trouble on his work, and gave to his modelling something of the breadth and truth that we find in the statues from Tello. These merits are seen at their best in a fine cylinder belonging to the New York Museum (Fig. 142). It represents Izdubar and his companion Hea-bani, the Hercules and Theseus of Chaldæan mythology, engaged in a hand-to-hand struggle with a wild bull and a lion, a scene which may be taken as personifying the struggle between the divine protectors of mankind on the one hand, and the blind forces of nature assisted by all the supernatural powers of evil on the other.[308] We have already had occasion to speak of Izdubar, who is always represented nude and very muscular. As for his companion, he combines the head and bust of a man with the hind quarters of a bull.[309] There is a certain conventionality in the attitude of the lion and in the way his claws are represented, and the movement of Hea-bani’s left arm is ungraceful; but the antelope under the inscription and the bull overpowered by Izdubar are rendered with a truth of judgment and touch that all connoisseurs will appreciate. We may say the same of the two heroes; their muscular development is given with frankness but without exaggeration; the treatment generally is free and broad.
Fig. 142.—Chaldæan cylinder. Marble or porphyry. New York Museum.
Between this cylinder and the one quoted on the last page as among the masterpieces of Ninevite art, there is the same difference as between the statues of Tello and the bas-reliefs of Nimroud and Khorsabad. The engraver, who some fifteen centuries before our era, cut upon marble this episode from one of the favourite myths of Chaldæa, may not have been able to manipulate precious stones with such ease and dexterity as the artist of Sargon or Sennacherib who made the cylinder in the British Museum, but he had the true feeling for life and form in a far higher degree.