Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/147

 Conventions of Chald/eo-Assyrian Sculpture. 127 head. It is of great interest because it recalls the very oldest Chaldaean statues both in material and attitude. It has suffered so much, however, and its workmanship seems to have been so sketchy, that even in the original itself the details of modelling and costume are hardly to be recognized. We give a slight sketch of it merely to show its pose. These statues, if they deserve such a name, show the work of the Assyrians at its feeblest ; the plastic genius of the people must not be judged from them, but from the genre in which they were most at home, from the long lines of figures that stand out in various salience from the palace walls. Among the produc- tions of this latter class that have come down to our time we find every degree of relief, from the bas-relief strictly speaking, to what is but little removed from the round. Fig. 61. — Statue of Shalmaneser II. Height 58 inches. British Museum. Let us begin with the bas-relief. It is with sculptures execu ted on this principle that the walls of temples and palaces were covered, as if with a stone tapestry. The Assyrian process is identical in principle with that afterwards adopted by the Greeks, as, on the whole, the most convenient for the purpose in view. We find no examples of the Egyptian fashion of defining the outlines of figures by a deep groove cut with the point, nor of those figures that were, so to speak, let into and modelled within the surface of the wall. 1 In both Chaldaea and Assyria the figure stands out from the bed of the relief from two or three millimetres to a centimetre, according to its size. The bed is nowhere hollowed, it is one even surface, except that where the 1 Art in Ancient Egypt, vol. ii, pp. 284-288 ; vol. i. fig. 173, and vol. ii. fig. 240. H