Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/226

 196 A History of Art in Ciialrka and Assyria. standing and suckling- her infant (Fig. 107) ;* her large, and perhaps slightly empty forms are modelled with ease and artistic feeling. She is, in all probability, a goddess of maternity. 2 In the statuette reproduced in our Fig. 108, the treatment is less free, its precision is a little dry and hard. The personage repre- sented employs the gesture proper to the nursing goddesses (see Vol. I. Fig. i6), although robed from head to foot. Her garment ends below in a deep fringe. On her head there is a Persian tiara. 3 This latter figure, in spite of certain qualities to which we are by no means blind, belongs to a period of decadence which lasted, Fig. 108. — Terra-cotta statuette. Height 4.5 inches. Louvre. perhaps, throughout the Persian domination, and even as late as the Seleucidae and Parthians. The types consecrated by religious tradition were repeated, but repeated with a hesitating and in- different hand, and with little reference to nature. The faults inherent in this kind of workmanship are still more conspicuous in the example, given in Fig. 16 of the first volume, of a type which was very common both in Chaldaea and Susiana. 4 Whether 1 This type comes from Tello. Among the statuettes found thereby M. de Sarzec, there were some in which it was reproduced, but they were all inferior to the example figured above. Layard found statuettes inspired by the same motive in a mound near Bagdad {Discoveries, p. 477). 2 Heuzey, Catalogue ', p. 30. 3 Ibid. p. 35. 4 Layard found this type near Bagdad (Discoveries, p. 477), and Loftus encountered a great number of examples in his explorations at Susa (Travels, &c,