Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/110

 Q2 A History of Art in Ciiald.ka and Assyria. have lent dignity without taking away vitality. These forms they covered as a rule w T ith ample drapery, but for certain types, those, for instance, of the goddess of love and fecundity, and the demi-god whom we have compared to the Greek Hercules, they had recourse to all the frankness of nudity. How was it that under such conditions they never succeeded in endowing their goddesses with grace, or their gods with nobility of form ? Can it be denied that the few nude figures they have left us are far inferior, not only to those the Greeks were afterwards to design with so sure a hand, but even to the hundreds and thousands of human forms with which the Egyptians had already peopled their bas-reliefs and funerary pictures ? Figs. 41, 42. — Fragments of an ivory statuette. British Museum. Actual size. Their first fault lay in an exaggerated striving after fidelity. They insisted blindly on certain details which are elsewhere suppressed or dissimulated, in obedience to a compromise which has been so generally accepted that it must surely be founded on reason. We may judge of this by two ivory fragments chosen from among those that were found in such numbers at Nimroud. They are, in all probability, statuettes of Istar (Figs. 41 and 42). The sculptor had noticed that the female pelvis was larger than the male, but he exaggerates its size and that of the bosom. The deep folds of the abdomen indicate an exhausted vitality, that of