ENAMELLED BRICKS IN THE HAREM
Khorsabad
Imp. Ch. Chardon
The Chaldæans made a wide use of lapis, which they imported from central Asia. The fatherland of that mineral is the region now called Badakshan, in Bactriana, whence, in ancient times, came what Theophrastus calls the Scythian stone. The caravans brought it into the upper valley of the Tigris, whence it made its way to Babylon and even as far as Egypt. The inscriptions of Thothmes III. mention the good khesbet of Babylon among the objects offered to Pharaoh by the Rotennou, or people of Syria.[354]
This fine lapis-powder, intimately united with the clay by firing, gave a solid enamel of a very pure colour. If mixed with a body of some consistence it might be used upon the sculptures; perhaps the blue with which certain accessories were tinted was thus obtained.
The yellow is an antimoniate of lead containing a certain quantity of tin; its composition is the same as that of the pigment now called Naples yellow.[355] White is an oxide of tin, so that the Arabs do not deserve the credit they have long enjoyed of being the first, about the ninth century a.d., to make use of white so composed.[356] The black is perhaps an animal pigment.[357] The green may have been obtained by a mixture of blue and yellow pigments, of ochre with oxide of copper, for instance. As for red, no colour is easier to get. The Nimroud enamellers used, perhaps, a sub-oxide of copper,[358] while those of Khorsabad employed the iron oxide of which our red chalk is composed.[359] We can examine the latter at our ease. The cake of red found by Place weighed some five-and-forty pounds. It dissolves readily in water.
The whole palette consisted, then, of some five or six colours, and their composition was so simple that no attempt to produce an appearance of reality by their aid could have been successful. Taken altogether, the painting of Mesopotamia was purely decorative; its ornamental purpose was never for a moment lost sight of, and the forms it borrowed from the organic world always had a peculiar character. When the figures of men and animals were introduced they were never shown engaged in some action which might of itself excite the curiosity of the spectator; their forms are not studied with the religious care that proves the artist to have been impelled by their own beauty and grace of movement to give them a place in his work. There are no shadows marking the succession of planes; in the choice of flat tints the artist has not allowed himself to be tied down to fact. Thus we find that in the kind of frieze of which we give a fragment at the foot of our Plate XIV. there is a blue bull, the hoofs and the end of the tail alone being black. Upon the plinth from the Khorsabad harem, a lion, a bird, a bull, a tree, and a plough are all yellow, without change of tint (Plate XV.) In the glazed brick on which a subject so often treated by the sculptors is represented (Plate XIV., Fig. 1), the painter has tried to compose a kind of picture, but even there the colours are frankly conventional. The flesh and the robes with their ornaments are all carried out in different shades of yellow. He makes no attempt to imitate the real colours of nature; all he cares about is to please the eye and to vary the monotony of the wide surfaces left unbroken by the architect. The winged genii and the fantastic animals could be used for such a purpose no less than the fret and the palmette, but as soon as they were so employed they become pure ornament. In a decoration like that of the archivolts at Khorsabad (Vol. I., Fig. 124), the great rosettes have the same value and brilliancy of tone as the figures by which they are separated; the whiteness of their petals may even give them a greater importance and more power to attract the eye of the spectator than the figures with their yellow draperies.
If the Ninevite bricks had never been recovered, we should have been in danger of being led into error by the expressions employed by Ctesias in describing the pictures he saw at Babylon, on the walls of the royal city: “One saw there,” he says, “every kind of animal, whose images were impressed on the brick while still unburnt; these figures imitated nature by the use of colour.”[360] We cannot say whether the words we have italicised belong to the text of Ctesias, or whether they were added by Diodorus to round off the phrase. It is certain that they give a false notion of the painted decorations. Those to whom the latter were intrusted no more thought of imitating the real colours of nature than the artists to whom we owe the glazed tiles of the Turkish and Persian mosques. The latter, indeed, gave no place in their scheme of ornament to the figures either of men or animals, and in that they showed, perhaps, a finer taste. The lions and bulls of the friezes had no doubt their effect, but yet our intelligence receives some little shock in finding them deprived of their true colours, and presented to our eyes in a kind of travesty of their real selves. Things used as ornaments have no inalienable colour of their own; the decorative artist is free to twist his lines and vary his tints as he pleases; his work will be judged by the result, and so long as that is harmonious and pleasing to the eye nothing more is required. We are tempted, therefore, on the whole, to consider some of those slabs of faïence upon which nothing appears but certain ornamental lines and combinations, suggested by geometrical and vegetable forms but elaborated by his own unaided fancy, as the masterpieces of the Assyrian enameller. If he had resolutely persevered in this path he might perhaps have produced something worthy to be compared for grace and variety with the marvellous faïence of Persia.
