Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/318

 286 A History ok Art in Chald^ea and Assyria. sake of rapid and ample production, made use of conventional formula", invented by deceased masters and handed down by tradition. Perhaps we may give a clearer notion of what we mean by a comparison. Under all the reserves implied by such collations, we should say that Chaldaean art was to that of Assyria what the Greek art of Phidias, Praxiteles, and Lysippus was to the Alexandrian and Graeco- Roman art which we now call Hellenistic. In the studios of Nineveh, as in those of Pergamus, of Rhodes, of Antioch, of Rome, great activity, great skill, and no little science were to be found ; even originality was sought for, but it was sought rather than won. Thus we find in Macedonian and Roman Greece, here a school drawing attention by audacious and perhaps theatrical execution, there another devoting its skill to pathetic subjects, and attempting to render physical agony by contracted muscles. So it is in Assyria. The ease with which alabaster and soft limestone could be cut allowed the artists who worked for Assurnazirpal to give to the ornamentation of the rich stuffs they figured a delicacy and refinement that were impossible in the stubborn stones of Chaldaea. Two centuries later the sculptors of Assurbanipal sought a new element of success in the complication of their scenes, in the grace of their execution, in the picturesque details of their landscape backgrounds, in the increased slenderness of their figures, and in a certain elegance spread over their compositions as a whole. It is certain that neither the Greek of the later centuries nor the Assyrian invented and created in the proper sense of the word. The Greek sculptor, thanks to a deeper comprehension of the true conditions of art and to the necessity under which he laboured of reproducing the nude, certainly did not remit his care for modelling, but he looked at the contours and the significance of the human body rather with the eyes of his masters and prede- cessors than with his own. It was to those masters that he was indebted for his propensity to see one set of features rather than another, and to give that interpretation to form that, taken altogether, constitutes the Greek style. The Assyrian sculptor was in much the same case, but as his figures were draped, almost without exception, it was much easier for him to put nature aside altogether and to fall into manner and