Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/299

 DECORATION. 277 placed by another brush on many details of the sculptured slabs. We shall discuss the question of polychromy in Assyrian sculpture at a future opportunity ; at present we are content with observing that the effect of the reliefs was strengthened here and there by the use of colour. The beard, the hair, and the eyebrows were tinted black ; such things as the fringes of robes, baldricks, flowers held in the hand, were coloured blue and red. The gaiety thus given brought a room into harmony, and prevented the cool grey of the alabaster slabs from presenting a disagreeable contrast with the brilliant tones spread over the roofs and upper walls. We might thus restore the interior of an Assyrian apartment and arrive at a whole, some elements of which would be certainly authentic and others at least very probable. The efforts hitherto made in this direction leave much to be desired, and give many an opportunity to the fault-finding critic ; and that because their makers have failed to completely master the spirit of Mesopotamian architecture as shown in its remaining fragments. 1 It would be much less easy, it would in fact be foolhardy, to attempt the restoration of a hall from a Babylonian palace. Our information is quite insufficient for such a task. We may affirm, however, that where the architect had no stone to speak of, the decorations must have had a somewhat different character from those in which that invaluable material was freely used. The general tendencies of both countries must have been the same, but between Nineveh and Babylon, still more between the capital of Assyria and the towns of Lower Chaldaea, there were differences 1 In writing thus we allude chiefly to the restorations given by Mr. James FERGUSSON in The Palaces of Nineveh and Persepclis Restored (i vol. 8vo. Murray), a work that was launched upon the world at far too early a date, namely, in 1851. Sir H., then Mr., LAYARD, had not yet published his second narrative {Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon} nor the second series of Monuments of Nineveh, neither had the great work of MM. Place and Thomas on the palace of Sargon (a work to which we owe so much new and authentic information) appeared. In Mr. Fergusson's restorations the column is freely used and the vault excluded, so that in many respects his work seems to us to be purely fanciful, and yet it is implicitly accepted by English writers to this day. Professor RAWLINSON, while criticising Mr. Fergusson in his text (The Five Great Monarchies, vol. i. p. 303, note 6), reproduces his restoration of the great court at Khorsabad, in which a colonnade is introduced upon the principle of the hypostyle halls of Persepolis. Professor Rawlinson would, perhaps, have been better advised had he refrained from thus popularizing a vision which, as he himself very justly declares, is quite alien to the genius of Assyrian architecture.