This feeling is visible chiefly in the battle pictures and hunting scenes. In these, no doubt, the drawing of limbs, &c., often leaves much to be desired. The hand has been unable to render all that the eye has seen. The unveiled human body has not been displayed often enough to the sculptor for him to know thoroughly the construction of its framework and the mode of attachment of its limbs. On the other hand, when animals have to be treated, with what singular power and complete success the same artist has often represented the tension of the contracting muscles, the speed of the horse as he stretches himself in the gallop, the spring of the lion as he throws himself upon the spear (see Fig. 161), and, finally, the trembling of the flesh in the last struggle against suffering and death! It is in the Assyrian monuments that these things are treated with the greatest success. A people of soldiers and hunters, whose truculent energy gave them the empire of all western Asia, they had neither the mild humour nor the fine taste of the Egyptians, they were less easily moved, and we find ourselves wondering that they never hit upon the fights of gladiators as a national pastime. They were touched and interested by force passing from repose into action, by force putting forth all its energies in contempt of danger and in spite of the most determined resistance.
Fig. 161.—Assurbanipal attacked by lions. British Museum. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.
The temperaments of the two nations were, then, vastly different, and by the time their mutual relations became close and continuous, each had thought too much, had worked too much, and created too much for itself to be in any great danger of losing its originality under the influence of the other. Moreover, the two civilizations never penetrated within one another. Their moments of contact were short and superficial. Under the great Theban conquerors of the eighteenth dynasty, the Egyptian armies advanced to the Euphrates, and the princes of Mesopotamia may, for a time, have recognized the suzerainty of the Pharaohs; this is proved to some extent by the numerous scarabs engraved with the name of Thothmes III., which have been found in the valley of the Khabour,[342] but after the nineteenth dynasty their hold upon these distant conquests must have been lost. Their access to them was barred by the Khetas, in Syria, and, a few centuries later, it was the Sargonids who invaded Egypt and admired its monuments so much that they carried some of them away, such as the lion found at Bagdad. It bears the oval of a Pharaoh who is believed to be one of the shepherd kings.[343] In the interval the importation of objects of luxury, which was carried on through the Phœnicians, had introduced a few foreign motives into the repertory of the Assyrian artists, such as the crouching sphinx and the lotus flower; the winged globe may also be Egyptian; but these borrowings never go beyond details; even if they were far more numerous than they are, they would not deprive the sculpture of the Mesopotamian Semites of its right to be considered an independent and autonomous form of art, whose merits and defects are to be explained by the inborn genius of the race, by its manner and beliefs, by the natural conditions of its home, and the qualities of the different materials employed.[344]
It is in the same order of ideas that we must seek a reason for the differences we have remarked between the art of the early Chaldæan monarchy as it has been revealed to us in the monuments recently discovered, and Assyrian art as we have known it ever since the explorations at Khorsabad, Nimroud, and Kouyundjik. In all this there is a most interesting question for the study of the historian. Of what nature was the bond by which the sculptors of Calah and Nineveh were allied to those who had chiselled the Sirtella statues, perhaps a thousand years before? What place does the brilliant and prolific art of Assyria occupy in the series of phases whose succession was governed by the laws that have presided over the development of human societies in every age and place? Until within the last few months we should have found it difficult to give a satisfactory answer to this question. Assyrian art offered contradictory features to the observer, and it was not easy to understand how, with so lively a feeling for form, and especially for movement, it could have admitted so much conventionality and repeated itself with so much insistence and prolixity. The combination of skill and awkwardness, of energy and platitude, was more than surprising. But the problem resolves itself as soon as we go back to the art of Chaldæa, the first-born of the two sister nations, and the pioneer of Mesopotamian civilization.
Assyrian art, even in its most ancient productions, was not, as we once believed, a primitive or even an archaic art; neither was it what we call a classic art, an art employing the skill it has acquired for the renewed study of nature and the sincere imitation of its beauties. We shall not call it a debased art or an art in its decadence; to do so would be to exaggerate our meaning; but it was an art no longer in its progress, an art that, for the sake of rapid and ample production, made use of conventional formulæ invented by deceased masters and handed down by tradition.
Perhaps we may give a clearer notion of what we mean by a comparison.
Under all the reserves implied by such collations, we should say that Chaldæan art was to that of Assyria what the Greek art of Phidias, Praxiteles, and Lysippus was to the Alexandrian and Græco-Roman art which we now call Hellenistic. In the studios of Nineveh, as in those of Pergamus, of Rhodes, of Antioch, of Rome, great activity, great skill, and no little science were to be found; even originality was sought for, but it was sought rather than won. Thus we find in Macedonian and Roman Greece, here a school drawing attention by audacious and perhaps theatrical execution, there another devoting its skill to pathetic subjects, and attempting to render physical agony by contracted muscles. So it is in Assyria. The ease with which alabaster and soft limestone could be cut allowed the artists who worked for Assurnazirpal to give to the ornamentation of the rich stuffs they figured a delicacy and refinement that were impossible in the stubborn stones of Chaldæa. Two centuries later the sculptors of Assurbanipal sought a new element of success in the complication of their scenes, in the grace of their execution, in the picturesque details of their landscape backgrounds, in the increased slenderness of their figures, and in a certain elegance spread over their compositions as a whole.
It is certain that neither the Greek of the later centuries nor the Assyrian invented and created in the proper sense of the word. The Greek sculptor, thanks to a deeper comprehension of the true conditions of art and to the necessity under which he laboured of reproducing the nude, certainly did not remit his care for modelling, but he looked at the contours and the significance of the human body rather with the eyes of his masters and predecessors than with his own. It was to those masters that he was indebted for his propensity to see one set of features rather than another, and to give that interpretation to form that, taken altogether, constitutes the Greek style.
The Assyrian sculptor was in much the same case, but as his figures were draped, almost without exception, it was much easier for him to put nature aside altogether and to fall into manner and routine. It is only when he has to represent animals that he seems to work from the living model. The human body, hidden under its long and heavy robes, did not discover enough to awake his interest; all that he sees—the features and the profile of the face, the throat, the lower parts of the arms and legs—he treats after the examples left to him by his Chaldæan leader. In the whole of Assyrian sculpture there is no passage studied from nature with faith and sincerity, like the hand, the shoulder, and the back in the statues of Gudea. The Chaldæan sculptor had a taste for strong modelling, and in this his Assyrian pupil copied him with such an excess of zeal that he arrived at exaggeration and pure convention. He knotted the knees of his figures, he gave them knee-caps standing out like huge bosses, and muscles so stretched and salient that they look like cables rather than flesh and blood. It is an early edition of what is now an old story. The master is betrayed by the pupil, who copies his mannerisms rather than his beauties and turns many of his fine qualities into defects.