Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/281

 POLYCHROMY. 249 representing a god crowned with a double-horned tiara, and covered all over, flesh and drapery alike, with an azure blue. 1 A demon with the head of a carnivorous animal, from the same place, is painted black, a colour that seems to suggest a malevolent being, walking in the night and dwelling in subterranean regions. The Assyrians also made use of what has been sometimes called natural polychromy, that is to say they introduced different materials into the composition of a single figure, each having a colour of its own and being used to suggest a similar tint in the object represented. Several fragments of this kind may be seen in the cases of the British Museum. 3 We may give as examples some eyes in black marble ; the ball itself is ivory while the pupil and iris are of blue paste, a sandy frit in which the colour sank deeply before firing. Beards and hair were also made of this material ; they have been found in several instances, without the heads to which they belonged. In the ruins from which he took these objects, Layard saw arms, legs and torsos of wood. They were so completely carbonized by fire that they could not be removed ; at the least touch they crumbled into powder. With wood, with enamel and coloured earths, with stones, both soft and hard, and metals both common, like bronze, and precious, like gold and silver, the sculptor built up statues and statuettes in which the peculiar beauty to. be attained by the juxtaposition of such heterogeneous materials, was steadily kept in view. With in- ferior taste and less feeling for purity of form than the Greeks, this art was identical in principal with the chryselephantine sculpture that created the Olympian Zeus and the Athene of the Parthenon. The idea that sculpture is the art in which form is treated to the exclusion of colour is quite a modern one. 4 The sculptor of 1 Heuzey, Catalogue, &c. p. 19. 2 Ibid. p. 20. Layard also found many of these blue statuettes at Khorsabad (Discoveries, p. 357). 3 These fragments were found by Layard in one of the small temples at Nimroud ( Discoveries, pp. 3 5 7 > 3 5 8 ) • 4 M. Sully Prudhomme has lately embodied this idea in his verses addressed to tha Venus of the Louvre [Devant la Vénus de Milo in the Revue politique for 6 January, 1883) : — " Dans les lignes du marbre où plus rien ne subsiste De l'éphémère éclat des modèles de chair, Le cisaau de sculpteur, incorruptible artiste, En isolant le Beau, nous le rend chaste et clair. VOL. IL k K