Charles Chipiez

“ In our own day, and over the whole of the vast continent that stretches from China to Asia Minor, there is not a stuff, however humble, that is woven on the loom or embroidered by the needle, but betrays an instinctive feeling for harmony so true and subtle that every artist wonders at it, and the most tasteful of our art workmen despair of reaching its perfection, and yet many of these faultless harmonies were conceived and realized in the tent of the nomad shepherd. ”

“ We may become better acquainted than we are now with the monumental history of Mesopotamia, but we shall never find within her borders artists worthy to be placed on a level with those Theban masters.
And if we compare the sculptors of Thebes and Nineveh, we shall arrive at the same conclusion. On the one hand we find artists who, whether they worked for the tomb or the temple, in the most stubborn or the most kindly materials, chiselled images that either delight us with their simple truth, or impress us with their noble gravity and colossal size. ”

“ How different and how much less favourable were the conditions under which the Assyrian sculptor exercised his art! For him the contours of the body and the attachments of the limbs were hidden behind heavy tunics covered with embroidery, and shawls often folded double. If by chance he caught a passing glimpse of the forms beneath, to what use could he put it? Two or three at the most of the divine types upon which his skill was most frequently employed involved a very partial nudity; most of the gods, and nearly all the men, were draped. ”

“ We can hardly be mistaken in recognizing a god in the personage seated on a richly decorated throne, towards whom two or three figures, sometimes of smaller size than himself, advance in an attitude of respectful homage. He is crowned with a lofty tiara, a long beard flows over his breast, a robe of fine plaited stuff enwraps his whole body and falls to his feet. He is a man in the prime of life; his air and costume must have been taken from those of the king. May we not look upon him as the first sketch for the Greek Zeus, the Zeus of Homer and Phidias? ”

“ When they wanted fine vases they turned to bronze; bronze could be gilded, it could be damascened with gold and silver, and when so treated was more pleasing to the eye and more provocative of thought and ingenuity on the part of the artist than mere clay. It was reserved for Greece to erect the painted vase into a work of art. Her taste alone was able to make us forget the poverty of the material in the nobility of the form and the beauty of the decoration ”

“ Nowhere, neither here nor in any other of the great Assyrian inscriptions, do we find the signs of care, the look of simple and serious sincerity, that distinguishes the ancient writing of Chaldæa. At Calah and Nineveh we have before us the work of a society already far advanced, a society which lives in the past and makes use, with mere mechanical skill, of the processes created and brought to a first perfection many centuries before. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If, as in Egypt, the sculptor and painter had made all the beauties of the human figure, and especially the graceful contours of woman, familiar to every eye, artizans would have known how to give more subtle and agreeable forms to their creations, and would have been compelled to give them. A knowledge of the nude would have enabled them to make countless variations on a single theme, and to use it again and again without danger of tiring the eye. All robed figures have a certain mutual resemblance, however little there may be in common in their movement and costume. ”

“ In the centuries that have passed since the fall of the Greek civilization the name and fame of Babylon have been kept alive by the passionate words of those Hebrew prophets who filled some of the most eloquent and poetic books of the Old Testament with their hatred of the Mesopotamian city, an ardent hate that has found an echo across the ages in the religion which is the heir of Judaism. ”

“ Of all barbarian cities, as the Greeks would say, Babylon has been the most famous, both in the ancient and the modern world; her name has stirred the imaginations of mankind more strongly than any other city of Asia. For the Greeks she was the Asiatic city par excellence, the eternal capital of those great oriental empires that were admired and feared by the Hellenic population even after their political weakness had been proved more than once. ”

“ Examine at your leisure the long series of pictures from a single palace that hang on the walls of the British Museum—the only place where such a comparison is possible—and you will be astonished at the inequality of their execution. Among those taken from a single room some are far better than others. Here and there we find figures that seem to have been touched upon and corrected by an experienced artist, while their immediate neighbours are treated in a soft and hesitating fashion. ”

“ It has suffered so much, however, and its workmanship seems to have been so sketchy, that even in the original itself the details of modelling and costume are hardly to be recognized. We give a slight sketch of it merely to show its pose.
These statues, if they deserve such a name, show the work of the Assyrians at its feeblest; the plastic genius of the people must not be judged from them, but from the genre in which they were most at home, from the long lines of figures that stand out in various salience from the palace walls. ”

“ The earliest Greek travellers, such as Herodotus and Ctesias, only saw the ruins of these magnificent structures and of their rich adornment of enamels, frescoes, and sculptured figures; and yet how great was their wonder! We can hardly reflect without emotion upon what we have lost in great works in stone and metal carried out in the style of which certain fragments from Tello and a few terra-cotta statuettes give us some faint idea. ”

“ There are no dead or beaten Assyrians. If we may believe the artist, the kings of Nineveh won all their battles without losing a man!
The hunting scenes are arranged with more judgment. In certain respects we might place them in the same class as the great reliefs from Nimroud. By right of their dignity and breadth, the latter must be considered the masterpieces of Assyrian sculpture, but these later works can boast an amount of energy and vitality and a truthfulness of handling that are worthy of no stinted praise. ”

“ There is nothing like a central group in which the episodes and incidents of the conflict could, as it were, be gathered up and epitomized. The sculptor exhausts himself in striving after the confused wealth of reality; our eye loses itself among the groups of combatants who seem to be sown broadcast over the field of the relief. The historian may find in it many curious details, but he who looks only for aesthetic enjoyment is soon bored. The whole composition is as confused as a real hand-to-hand fight. ”

“ Is it not better to employ some [192] expression that has been sanctified by custom, and one to which the critic and historian instinctively turns? When he seeks for a special term to denote the different phases of an organic development, what does he call the phase in which execution is at once free and informed with knowledge, when the hand of the artist, having won complete mastery over itself and over the material on which it is employed, allows him to reproduce those aspects of nature by which he has been charmed and interested? ”

“ From the rich plains where the Hebrew tradition set the cradle of the human race, the winds carried many seeds besides those by which men’s bodies have so long been nourished; the germs of all useful arts and of all mental activities were borne on their breath like a fertilizing dust. Among those distant ancestors of [400] whom we are the direct heirs, those ancestors who have left us that heritage of civilization which grows with every year that passes, there are none, perhaps, to whom our respect and our filial gratitude are more justly due than to the ancient inhabitants of Chaldæa. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For in every epic worthy of the name the marvellous occupies an important place, while in these reliefs it scarcely has a place at all. With few exceptions the belief in a superior and divine world makes itself felt in Assyrian art only in those effigies of gods and demons we have already described. And such images have their places rigidly fixed by tradition; they stand at the palace gates, but are scarcely ever found within its saloons, and are entirely absent from the marches, battles, and sieges. ”

“ Both inside and outside, the Assyrian palaces had the upper parts of their walls and the archivolts of their doors decorated with enamelled bricks or paintings in distemper. Is it to be supposed that where the reliefs began all artificial tinting left off, and that the eye had nothing but the dull grey of gypsum and limestone to wander to from the rich dyes of the carpets with which the floors were strewn? Nothing could well be more disagreeable than such a contrast. ”

“ Thus we find a passage in which men are shown carting timber, and another in which they are dragging a winged bull, both surmounted by a grove of cypresses, while still higher on the slab, and, therefore, in the intention of the sculptor, on a more distant horizon, we see a river, upon which boatmen propel their clumsy vessels, and fishermen, astride on inflated skins, drift with the stream, while fishes nibble at their baited lines. ”

“ In the case of sculpture the balance hangs about level. The two schools rendered living forms, and especially those of mankind, in different ways, but their merits have seemed to us to be distinct rather than very unequal. In one we have found a more delicate feeling for line, for grace and refinement of contour; in the minutest statuettes as in the most gigantic colossi, we have tasted the charm of that proud and smiling serenity that is expressed as much in attitude and gesture as in the face. ”

“ But yet the Assyrian type is by no means without a certain nobility and beauty of its own. In spite of their colossal dimensions, in spite of the supernatural vigour of their limbs and the exaggerated energy and salience of their muscles, there is a kind of robust grace in the leading lines and proportions of these figures to which we cannot be indifferent, and their effect is increased by the wings that lie along their backs and furnish so happily the upper part of the huge alabaster slabs, above which nothing rises but the horned tiara. ”

“ It was upon clay that they learnt to write; it was to slabs of terra-cotta that their kings confided the memory of their victories and acts of devotion, and the private population their engagements and the contracts into which they entered. For thousands of years tablets of clay thus received not only long texts, but those impressions from seals, each one of which represents a signature. While wet and soft, clay readily accepted any symbol that man chose to place upon it; once it was burnt, those symbols became practically indestructible. ”

“ If, before the advent of the Greeks, there were any people in the ancient world in whom a passion for beauty was innate, they were the people of Egypt. The taste of Chaldæa was narrower, less frank and less unerring; she was unable, at least in the same degree, to ally force with grace; her ideal had less nobility, and her hand less freedom and variety. It is by merits of a different kind that she regains the advantage lost in the arts. If her artists fell short of their rivals, her savants seem to have been superior to those of Egypt. ”

“ The fatigue we feel will be changed into the interest that never palls of fighting one’s battles over again, and into the natural pride aroused by the pages of a history that chronicled no defeat, that spoke of nothing but the long sequence of victories won by the legions of Assyria over every nation that had the temerity to oppose her arms. ”