Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/100

 So A HISTORY OF ART IN CHALD/EA AND ASSYRIA. than beings with the power of life and motion. It was not so in Chaldaea, as we shall see if we examine the procedure of the Mesopotamia!! artist when he had to figure the greater gods, those in whom the highest efforts of mental abstraction found concrete o expression. Take, for instance, Nebo, the god of intelligence and prophecy, and Istar, the personification of the earth's fertility, of its power of creation and destruction and its inexhaustible energy. Nebo stands upright, his head covered with a horned tiara : his ample beard is gathered into three rows of close curls : he wears a long robe falling straight to the ground (Fig. 16). As for Istar, she is a young woman, nude, large-hipped, and pressing her breasts with her hands (Fig. 15). The awkwardness and rudeness which to some extent characterizes these figures is due to the inexperience of the artist ; his intentions were good, but his skill was hardly equal to giving them full effect. His Nebo was meant to be as majestic as a king or high priest ; his Istar is the spouse, the mother, the nurse ; she is the goddess " who," as the inscriptions say, 1 " rejoices mankind," who, when fertilized by love, assures the duration and perpetuity of the species. It was this method of interpretation that was in later years to lead to those great creations of Greek art whose beauty is still the wonder of man- kind. Between these ChalcLnean figures and those of the Greek sculptors the difference was one of degree. The anthropomorphism of the Chaldees was franker than that of the Egyptians, and so far the art of Chaldaea was an advance upon that of Egypt, although it was excelled by the latter in executive qualities. The method to which it had committed itself, the diligent and passionate study of the human figure, was the royal road to all excellence in the plastic arts. But our present business is to discover this people's real con- ceptions of its gods and to get a clear idea of their characteristic qualities. We shall not attempt, therefore, to show how most of them belonged to one of those divine triads which are to be found, it is believed, in Chaldsea as well as in Egypt : we shall not ask how these triads were subordinated, first, one to another, and secondly, to a single supreme being, who, in Mesopotamia as elsewhere, was in time perceived more or less clearly and placed at the head of the divine hierarchy. These triads are nearly always 1 RAWLINSON, 77?^ Fire Great Monarchies, &c. vol. 5. p. 139.