Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/277

 POLYCHROMY. 245 poverty of his construction and to furnish the great bare walls of his clay buildings. Both inside and outside, the Assyrian palaces had the upper parts of their walls and the archivolts of their doors decorated with enamelled bricks or paintings in distemper. Is it to be supposed that where the reliefs began all artificial tinting left off, and that the eye had nothing but the dull grey of gypsum and limestone to wander to from the rich dyes of the carpets with which the floors were strewn ? Nothing could well be more disagreeable than such a contrast. In our own day, and over the whole of the vast continent that stretches from China to Asia Minor, there is not a stuff, however humble, that is woven on the loom or embroidered by the needle, but betrays an instinctive feeling for harmony so true and subtle that every artist wonders at it, and the most tasteful of our art workmen despair of reaching its perfection, and yet many of these faultless harmonies were conceived and realized in the tent of the nomad shepherd. We can hardly believe that in the palace where official art lavished all its resources in honour of its master, there could be any part from which the gaiety that colour gives was entirely excluded, especially if it was exactly the part to which the eye of every visitor would be most surely attracted. Before going into the question of evidence one might, therefore, make up our minds that the Assyrian architect never allowed any such element of failure to be introduced into his work ; and the excavations have made that conclusion certain. The Assyrian reliefs were coloured, but they were not coloured all over like those of Egypt ; the grain of the stone did not disappear, from one end of the frieze to the other, under a layer of painted stucco. Flandin, the draughtsman attached to the expedition of M. Botta, alone speaks of a coat of ochre spread over the bed of the relief and over the nude portions of the figures ; 1 he confesses, however, that the traces were very slight and that they occurred only on a slab here and there. Botta, who saw the same slabs, thought his colleague mistaken. 2 Place is no less decided : " None of us," he says, " could find any traces of paint upon the 1 Flandin published in the Revue des deux Mondes (15 June, and 1 July, 1845), two papers under the general title of Voyage ai-chéologique à JVinive, and headed severally V Architecture assyrienne, and La Sculpture assyrienne. The assertion to which we have alluded will be found in the second of the two articles, at page 106. 2 Botta, Monument de Ninive, vol. v. p. 178.