Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/317

 Characteristics of Ciiald/eo-Assyrian Sculpture. 285 It is in the same order of ideas that we must seek a reason for the differences we have remarked between the art of the early Chaldsean monarchy as it has been revealed to us in the monuments recently discovered, and Assyrian art as we have known it ever since the explorations at Khorsabad, Nimroud, and Kouyundjik. In all this there is a most interesting question for the study of the historian. Of what nature was the bond by which the sculptors of Calah and Nineveh were allied to those who had chiselled the Sirtella statues, perhaps a thousand years before ? What place does the brilliant and prolific art of Assyria occupy in the series of phases whose succession was governed by the laws that have presided over the development of human societies in every age and place ? Until within the last few months we should have found it difficult to give a satisfactory answer to this question. Assyrian art offered contradictory features to the observer, and it was not easy to understand how, with so lively a feeling for form, and especially for movement, it could have admitted so much conventionality and repeated itself with so much insistance and prolixity. The combination of skill and awkwardness, of energy and platitude, was more than surprising. But the problem resolves itself as soon as we go back to the art of Chaldaea, the first-born of the two sister nations, and the pioneer of Mesopotamian civilization. Assyrian art, even in its most ancient productions, was not, as we once believed, a primitive or even an archaic art ; neither was it what we call a classic art, an art employing the skill it has acquired for the renewed study of nature and the sincere imita- tion of its beauties. We shall not call it a debased art or an art in its decadence ; to do so would be to exaggerate our meaning ; but it was an art no longer in its progress, an art that, for the Studie, with two lithographic plates, Marburg, 8vo, 1883) Herr Ludwig von Sybel has investigated the influence exercised by what he calls Asiatic orna?nent upon Egyptian art, after the commencement of the second Theban empire. The impression left by his inquiry — which is conducted with much order and critical acumen — is that Egypt, by the intermediary of the Phoenicians, received more from Assyria and Chaldaea than she gave. This influence was exercised chiefly by the numerous metal objects imported into the Nile valley from western Asia, where metallurgy was more advanced and more active than in Egypt. We may have doubts as to some of Herr von Sybel's comparisons, and may think he sometimes exaggerates the Asiatic influence, but none the less may his work be read both with profit and interest.