Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/320

 288 A History of Art in Ciiald.ea and Assyria. we believe, be inferior to that of Egypt. No doubt it possesses certain qualities not to be found in the latter. The statues from Tello have a freedom and vigour of modelling in certain parts that can hardly be prized too highly, and the Memphite artist never chiselled anything so full of intense life and movement as the animals at Kouyundjik ; but without again referring to faults already treated at length we may say that the supreme defect of Mesopotamian sculpture is its want of variety. It is a powerful but monotonous art. For each class of fio-ures it had but one mould. It seems never to have suspected how unlike men are to each other when they are looked at closely ; we are tempted to believe that it never made a portrait in the true sense of the word. It held through many centuries to the general and abstract types created at first, and repeated them with a constancy that inevitably causes some weariness in the spec- tator. It also committed the mistake of spreading a single colour, speaking metaphorically, over all its pictures ; as a musician would say, all its compositions were in the same key ; it was always serious ; it did not understand how to laugh or unbend. In the elaboration of its demons it certainly cast about for as much ugliness as it could find, but that was to frighten and not to amuse. In all the remains of Assyrian art there is no trace of playful humour, of the light- hearted gaiety that is so conspicuous in more than one Egyptian monument. In the subordinate parts of some of the reliefs from the Sargonid period we find certain groups and scenes belonging to what we should call genre, but neither here, nor in the bronzes, nor in engraved gems, nor even in the terra-cottas, do we find anything that approaches caricature. The comic element, without which no representation of life can be faithful and complete, is entirely wanting. A final defect of Assyrian art is the almost total absence of woman from its creations. In Chaldsea we found her in the small bronzes and in a few clay figures ; the canephorus with bare arms and bust, the nursing goddesses who bear a child in their arms or who press their breasts with their open hands, will be remem- bered, but it would seem that such subjects were treated only in figures of very small dimensions. In the fragmentary reliefs and statues from Chaldaea there is nothing to suggest that female forms, either wholly or partially nude, were either cast or