Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/107

 Themes of Chald/eo-Assyrian Sculpture. 89 call them so, accomplishing some such task as those that made the fame of the Greek Hercules, whose ancestor he may perhaps have been. We find him on a cylinder in the British Museum carrying off a slain lion on his shoulders (Fig. 35). We again find the human form predominant in those great winged genii for which Chaldaean art had so strong a predilection (Figs. 4 and 29). The two pairs of wings are very happily allied to the body, and both Greek and modern art has had recourse to the type thus created, the former for the figures of certain minor divinities, especially for that of Victory, and Christian art for its angels. In both these instances, however, we find but a single pair of wings* The artists of Assyria, especially in their rare attempts to treat the figure from a front view, have used the two pairs of wings with great felicity to furnish the background, against which the human form stands out in all the vigour of its robust muscularity. Our readers may judge of this from our reproduction of one of the reliefs brought to the Louvre from Khorsabad (Fig. 36). These winged men serve as a kind of transition between the complex beings noticed above, and the sculptures in which the Jiuman form is treated without any supernatural additions. So far as we can guess in our present uncertainty as to the ranks of the celestial hierarchy of Chaldaea, it would appear that the forms and features of men and women were alone thought worthy to represent the greatest of their divinities. Take the statue of Nebo, figured on page 81 of our last volume, take the gods introduced into the ceremonies we have already figured (Vol. I., Figs. 13 and 14), after reliefs from Nimroud and Kouyundjik (Fig. 3J). 1 In this last-named work the god, Raman or Marduk, holds a flower. At Nimroud there is a god with horned forehead who grasps an axe in one hand and a thunderbolt in the other. In the female figure, twice repeated with slightly different attributes, that precedes the god, Istar has been recognized. See also the statue of Istar in Vol. I., Fig. 16, and the image of that Chaldaean Venus so often repeated on the cylinders (Figs. ^S and 39). In form Istar is but a woman, and the artist would 1 This must represent one of the favourite rites of the Chaldseo-Assyrian religion, allusion to it is made in the passage given as a letter of Jeremiah (Baruch vi. 25) : " Now shall ye see in Babylon gods of silver, and of gold, and of wood, borne upon shoulders, which cause the nations to fear." VOL. II. N