Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/255

 Assyrian Sculpture. With the accession of Sennacherib, a sensible change comes over the aspect of the reliefs. What until now has been the ex- ception becomes the rule. On almost every slab we find a com- plex and carefully treated landscape background. The artist is not satisfied with indicating the differences between conifers, cypresses, and pines (Vol. I. Figs, 41 — 43), palms (ib. Figs. 30 and 34 ; and above, Fig. 21), the vine (Fig. 47), and the tall reeds and grasses of the marsh (Fig. 119) are also imitated. 1 We feel that the sculptor wished to reproduce all those sub- ordinate features of nature by which his eye was amused on the Assyrian plains ; he seems almost to have taken photographs from nature, and then to have transferred them to the palace walls by the aid of his patient chisel. Look, for instance, at the reliefs in which the process of building Sennacherib's palace is narrated. Fig. 119.— Marsh vegetation ; from Layard. The sculptor is not content with retracing, in a spirit of uncom- promising reality, all the operations implied by so great an under- taking ; he gives backgrounds to his pictures in which he introduces, on a smaller scale, many details that have nothing to do with the main subject of the relief. Thus we find a passage in which men are shown carting timber, and another in which they are dragging a winged bull, both surmounted by a grove of cypresses, while still higher on the slab, and, therefore, in the intention of the sculptor, on a more distant horizon, we see a river, upon which boatmen propel their clumsy vessels, and fishermen, astride on inflated skins, drift with the stream, while fishes nibble at their baited lines. 2 1 Botanists are of opinion that the conventional representations of the marsh vegetation suggests the horse-grass, or shave-grass (prêle), rather than the arundo- donax, in which the leaves are longer and thinner. 2 See Layard, Monuments, second series, plates 12 and 13.