We may now see how much the Chaldæan excavations and the collection which the Louvre owes to M. de Sarzec are calculated to teach the historian of art. These discoveries, by their intrinsic importance and by the light they have thrown on the origin of a great civilization, may almost be compared to those of Lepsius and Mariette, to the systematic researches and happy finds that have revealed the Egypt of the ancient empire to us. Assyrian art is no longer a puzzling phenomenon. Like the Egyptian art of the Theban epoch, it was preceded by a realistic and naturalistic, an inquisitive, simple-minded, and single-hearted art, which had faithfully studied the human form and had thus created one of the original styles of antiquity, a style, perhaps, in which Greece at its first beginning found the most useful lessons and the most fertile suggestions.
As we have already confessed, we can form but a very imperfect notion of what the art of Chaldæa was in its best days, in its period of youth and freshness. The remains are few and small; they are heads separated from the bodies to which they once belonged, chips from broken reliefs and a few small bronze and terra-cotta statuettes. Even supposing that new discoveries come to fill up the gaps, so that the development of Chaldæo-Assyrian art may be embraced as a whole, even then it would, we believe, be interior to that of Egypt. No doubt it possesses certain qualities not to be found in the latter. The statues from Tello have a freedom and vigour of modelling in certain parts that can hardly be prized too highly, and the Memphite artist never chiselled anything so full of intense life and movement as the animals at Kouyundjik; but without again referring to faults already treated at length we may say that the supreme defect of Mesopotamian sculpture is its want of variety.
It is a powerful but monotonous art. For each class of figures it had but one mould. It seems never to have suspected how unlike men are to each other when they are looked at closely; we are tempted to believe that it never made a portrait in the true sense of the word. It held through many centuries to the general and abstract types created at first, and repeated them with a constancy that inevitably causes some weariness in the spectator. It also committed the mistake of spreading a single colour, speaking metaphorically, over all its pictures; as a musician would say, all its compositions were in the same key; it was always serious; it did not understand how to laugh or unbend. In the elaboration of its demons it certainly cast about for as much ugliness as it could find, but that was to frighten and not to amuse. In all the remains of Assyrian art there is no trace of playful humour, of the light-hearted gaiety that is so conspicuous in more than one Egyptian monument. In the subordinate parts of some of the reliefs from the Sargonid period we find certain groups and scenes belonging to what we should call genre, but neither here, nor in the bronzes, nor in engraved gems, nor even in the terra-cottas, do we find anything that approaches caricature. The comic element, without which no representation of life can be faithful and complete, is entirely wanting.
A final defect of Assyrian art is the almost total absence of woman from its creations. In Chaldæa we found her in the small bronzes and in a few clay figures; the canephorus with bare arms and bust, the nursing goddesses who bear a child in their arms or who press their breasts with their open hands, will be remembered, but it would seem that such subjects were treated only in figures of very small dimensions. In the fragmentary reliefs and statues from Chaldæa there is nothing to suggest that female forms, either wholly or partially nude, were either cast or chiselled in anything approaching life size. Still less were such things made in Assyria, where no terra-cotta figure even of the deity to whom the names of Istar, Beltis, Mylitta, and Zarpanitu have all been given, has yet been found. It was, however, at Kouyundjik that the only nude female torso yet discovered in Mesopotamia was dug up. It bears the name Assurbilkala, and is now, as we have said above, in the British Museum.[345] Among the ivories, indeed, we find female statuettes in which we are tempted to recognize the same goddess; but where were those ivories carved? We have good reason to believe that not a few are of Phœnician workmanship.
The real national art of Assyria must be sought in the palace reliefs, and in that long illustrated chronicle of the court, the chase, and the royal campaigns, woman plays a very subordinate part. It has been thought that a tall, beardless individual who occurs near one of the doorways of Assurnazirpal’s palace, in the place generally reserved for divinities, should be accepted as a goddess (Fig. 162).[346] She is winged, and her hair is gathered together at the back of the neck, one long knotted and tasselled tress falling nearly to her loins. Her right arm is raised, her left lowered; in her left hand she holds a small wreath or garland. A wide girdle at the waist confines a long robe falling to the feet, and a fringed and flounced mantle. Nothing is seen through this drapery, such as amplitude of bosom or hips, to suggest the female sex, while the jewels that may be noticed on the neck and wrists and in the ears are also to be found on figures that are certainly male. In fact there is nothing to suggest a woman but the arrangement of the hair and a certain unwonted refinement in the execution of the features. And it is only by external signs like these, by the pose and the costume, that the few women in the bas-reliefs are to be recognized. This observation holds good for the queen of Assurbanipal as well as for the musicians who celebrate his victories and the captives led into slavery by the Assyrian armies.
Fig. 162.—Figure of a goddess. British Museum. Drawn by Wallet.
We can hardly say then that woman had any place in Assyrian art; she was represented, if at all, only by her robes. In the long series of reliefs you find none of the charming variety given to Egyptian art by the slender forms of goddesses, queens, dancers, and players on the mandolin, who crowd the pictures and allow the graceful contours of their youthful bodies to be seen through their transparent robes. In spite, then, of all its merits, the art of the Assyrian sculptor is far from complete. His neglect of the soft nobleness inherent in the beauty of woman deprived him of a precious resource; his works are without the telling contrasts that nature has set up between the forms of man and those of his mate. We have endeavoured to do him justice; we have sought to put in full light the merits by which he attracts our admiration, but we cannot help seeing that he lacks something that we have found in Egypt and shall find again in Greece; he is without the charm of grace and light.
