Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/111

 Themes of Chald^eo-Assyrian Sculpture. 93 a woman who has been many times a mother, and other details of this region are rendered with a clumsy insistance. 1 There is no evidence in Chaldaean art of the feeling for proportion which distinguishes Egyptian sculpture. Its render- ings of the human figure are nearly always too short and thick- set ; even those works which by their general facility and justness of movement most strongly attract our admiration, are not free from this fault. Its effects may be estimated very clearly from the stele representing Marduk-idin-akhi, a king of Babylon (Fig. 43), whose date is placed in about the twelfth century b.c. It is true that the defect in question is more conspicuous in this relief than, perhaps, in any other work of the school to which we can point ; but in all it is more or less perceptible. In Assyria, under the later Sargonids, sculptors made an effort to correct it, but even their comparatively slender figures have a certain heaviness. Assyrian sculpture has many good points, but it is never elegant. The Assyrian and Chaldaean sculptors were discouraged from acquiring a complete knowledge of the human form by the fact that it was not demanded by their patrons. The public who judged their works did not perceive their shortcomings in that respect. There was nothing in their daily life, or in the requirements they laboured to fulfil, which either assisted them to make good their deficiencies, or compelled them to do it for themselves. They seldom beheld the nude form, still more seldom did they have to introduce it into their works. The Greek writers speak of it as a peculiarity of " the barbarians," whether Syrians or Chaldaeans, Lydians or Persians, that they were ashamed to be seen naked, the men as much as the women. Such a scruple, especially in the male, would seem hardly comprehensible to the Greek accustomed to the nudity of the gymnasium. 2 1 In the great stone torso of which we shall speak presently (p. 98), these details seem to have been omitted ; at least no trace of them is to be found on the stone ; but they may have been added in paint. In figures of men the Assyrians very rarely indicated the male organs. One of the personages sculptured on the Balawat gates affords an exception to this general practice, but he is a prisoner about to be put to death, and the detail in question is a kind of indignity meant by the sculptor to show that the man in question was a savage who fought in puris naturalibus. 2 Among the Lydians, says Herodotus, in his account of the adventure of Gyges (i. 10), "As among nearly all barbarous nations, it was a great indignity, even for