Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/122

 io4 A History of Art in Ciiald.ea and Assyria. was thought to be capable of wielding a chisel had to be pressed into the service. Sculptors of established fame who had already helped to decorate more than one palace, mediocre artists with more age and experience than talent, young apprentices entering the workshops for the first time, all were enlisted, and each received his share of the common task. Under such conditions, and especially when the utmost expedition was required, the collective work could not help showing signs of the many and variously skilled hands that had been employed upon it. Even with the Greeks, and even, which is still more to the point, with the Athenians of the age of Pericles, something of the same kind is to be noticed. The frieze of that temple of Pallas, which is, perhaps, the most carefully wrought creation of human hands, is not all equally fine in execution. Some parts show the work merely of a skilful carver, while before others we feel that here has been the hand of the great master himself, that the play of the chisel has been governed by the brain that traced the original sketch and thought out the whole marvellous conception. And these differences are still more obvious in the great com- positions turned out so rapidly by Assyrian sculptors. Examine at your leisure the long series of pictures from a single palace that hang on the walls of the British Museum — the only place where such a comparison is possible — and you will be astonished at the inequality of their execution. Among those taken from a single room some are far better than others. Here and there we find figures that seem to have been touched upon and corrected by an experienced artist, while their immediate neighbours are treated in a soft and hesitating fashion. Curiously enough the figures representing enemies are, as a rule, very roughly modelled ; sometimes they are hardly more than blocked out. It seems as if they wished, from the beginning, to have no mistake as to relative dignity between the soldiers of Assur and those men of inferior race whom they condescended to slay. 1 A hurried artist repeats himself deliberately. Repetition spares him the fatigue of reflection and invention. The Assyrians loved 1 Sir H. Layard, who has seen more Assyrian sculptures in place than any one else, seems to have been much struck by these incongruities. " It is rare," he says, " to find an entire (Assyrian) bas-relief equally well executed in all its parts " {Nineveh, vol. ii. p. 78).