Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/334

 296 A History of Art in Ciialp.t.a and Assyria. not allowed himself to be tied down to fact. Thus we find that in the kind of frieze of which we çrive a fragment at the foot of our Plate XIV. there is a blue bull, the hoofs and the end of the tail alone being black. Upon the plinth from the Khorsabad harem, a lion, a bird, a bull, a tree, and a plough are all yellow, without change of tint (Plate XV.) In the glazed brick on which a subject so often treated by the sculptors is represented (Plate XIV., Fig. 1), the painter has tried to compose a kind of picture, but even there the colours are frankly conventional. The flesh and the robes with their ornaments are all carried out in different shades of yellow. He makes no attempt to imitate the real colours of nature ; all he cares about is to please the eye and to vary the monotony of the wide surfaces left unbroken by the architect. The winged genii and the fantastic animals could be used for such a purpose no less than the fret and the palmette, but as soon as they v/ere so employed they become pure ornament. In a decoration like that of the archivolts at Khorsa- bad (Vol. I., Fig. 124), the great rosettes have the same value and brilliancy of tone as the figures by which they are separated ; the whiteness of their petals may even give them a greater importance and more power to attract the eye of the spectator than the figures with their yellow draperies. If the Ninevite bricks had never been recovered, we should have been in danger of being led into error by the ex- pressions employed by Ctesias in describing the pictures he saw at Babylon, on the walls of the royal city : " One saw there," he says, " every kind of animal, whose images were impressed on the brick while still unburnt ; these figures imitated nature by the use of colour " x We cannot say whether the words we have italicised belong to the text of Ctesias, or whether they were added by Diodorus to round off the phrase. It is certain that they give a false notion of the painted decorations. Those to whom the latter were intrusted no more thought of imitating the real colours of nature than the artists to whom we owe the glazed tiles of the Turkish and Persian mosques. The latter, indeed, gave no place in their scheme of ornament to the figures either of men or animals, and in that they showed, perhaps, a finer taste. The lions and bulls of the friezes had no doubt their effect, but yet our intelligence receives some little shock in finding them 1 Diodorus, ii. viii. 4.