Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/306

 284 A HISTORY OF ART IN CHALD^A AND ASSYRIA. a contrivance that increased their solidity and effect. 1 This may be observed on the Babylonian bricks brought to Europe by M. Delaporte, consul-general for France at Bagdad. They are now in the Louvre. On one we see the three white petals belong- in^ to one of those Marguerite-shaped flowers that artists have used in such profusion in painted and sculptured decoration (Figs. 22, 25, 96, 116, ii/). Another is the fragment of a wing, and must have entered into the composition of one of those winged genii that are hardly less numerous in Assyrian decoration (Figs. 4, 8, and 29). Upon a third you may recognize the trunk of a palm-tree and on a fourth the sinuous lines that edge a drapery. 2 M. de Longperier calculated from the dimensions of this latter fragment that the figure to which it belonged must have been four cubits high, exactly the height assigned by Ctesias to the figures in the groups seen by him w r hen he visited the palace of the ancient kings. 3 M. Oppert also mentions fragments which had formed part of similar important compositions. Yellow scales separated from one another by black lines, reminded him of the conventional figure under which the Assyrians represented hills or mountains ; on others he found fragments of trees, on others blue undulations, significant, no doubt, of water ; on others, again, parts of animals the foot of a horse, the mane and tail of a lion. A thick, black line upon a blue ground may have stood for the lance of a hunter. Upon one fragment a human eye, looking full to the front, might be recognized. 4 We might be tempted to think that in these remains M. Oppert saw all that was left of the pictures which excited the admiration of Ctesias. Inscriptions in big letters obtained by the same process accom- panied and explained the pictures. The characters were white on a blue ground. M. Oppert brought together some fifteen of these monumental texts, but he did not find a single fragment upon which there was more than one letter. The inscriptions were meant to be legible at a considerable distance, for the letters 1 " The painting," says M. OPPERT, " was applied to a kind of roughly blocked -out relief." (Expedition stientifique, vol. i. p. 144.) 2 DE LONGPEKIER, Musee Napoleon III., plate iv. 3 This palace was then inhabited for a part of the year by the Achemenid princes, of whom Ctesias was both the guest and physician.
 * OPPERT, Expedition ssientifique, vol. i. pp. 143, 144