PAINTING.
In the inventory we are compiling of the various methods used by the
Semites of Mesopotamia to address the intellect through the eyes,
we shall consecrate a chapter to painting for form’s sake. The kind
of representation we call by that name was no more known to the
Assyrians and Chaldæans than it was to the Egyptians.[347] They loved
brilliant colours, but they only made use of them for what was, in
fact, illumination; they coloured figures and ornaments, but they never
_painted_, as the word is understood in all modern languages.
In our endeavours to explain how the Mesopotamian architect disguised,
under a robe of gay tints, the poverty of the materials with which he
was forced to work, we showed that he employed colour in two different
ways, according to the place occupied in the building by the wall he
had to cover.[348] In the interiors of rooms he was, in most cases,
satisfied with spreading upon the plaster a coat of some pigment that
could be easily renewed when it began to fade; but in those parts of
the building that were exposed to the weather, and even in some rooms
that were the objects of particular care, he had recourse to the
solidity of enamel. We have pointed out the favourite motives both in
the distemper paintings and in the kind of mosaic given by the glazed
or enamelled bricks; we have yet to say what tints the enameller used
and how he used them. Our coloured plates will give a better idea of
this decoration than we can give in words (Plates XIII., XIV., and
XV.).[349]
In the carpets still woven in Asia Minor, Kurdistan, Khorassan and
Persia there are colours at once brilliant and soft that are a constant
delight to the eye of the connoisseur. We may point, for instance, to
certain reds and greens at which the manufacturers of Europe gaze in
despair, in spite of the resources of modern chemistry. This freshness
and solidity of tint is explained by the almost exclusive use of
vegetable dyes. These the Kurd or Turkoman extracts from mountain
plants, sometimes from the stem or the root, sometimes from the blossom
or the seed.[350] These inventions and recipes have been handed down
from generation to generation through many ages; the secret of many
dyes must have been discovered long before the fall of Nineveh or the
beginning of the Babylonian decadence. Down to the very last days of
antiquity the dyers of Mesopotamia were famous for their processes
and the harmonious splendour of their colours. Since the days of
Nebuchadnezzar the people of that region have forgotten much, while
they have learnt nothing, perhaps, but how to hasten the depopulation
of their country by the use of gunpowder. All the professional skill
and creative activity of which they still can boast they owe to the
survival of this ancient industry, whose traditions and practical
methods are preserved in the hut of the mountaineer, under the tent of
the nomad, and in those bazaars where so many agile weavers repeat,
with marvellous rapidity of hand and sureness of eye, the designs and
motives of thirty or forty centuries ago.
Among the colouring materials still in use in the woollen fabrics of
the Levant there can be very few with which the ancients were not
acquainted, and perhaps they used some of them in their distemper
paintings; but the latter were no more than feeble shadows when
discovered, and they soon vanished when exposed to the air. It was
different with those that had been subjected to the action of fire.
They could be removed and analyzed. But the enameller confined himself
almost exclusively to mineral colours, of which alone we can now
describe the composition.
The two colours most frequently used were blue and yellow. Backgrounds
were nearly always blue (Plates XIII. and XV.), and most of the figures
yellow. Certain details were reinforced by touches of black and white.
In the brick representing the king followed by his servants (Plate
XIV., Fig. 1), the royal tiara is white, the hair, beards, bows,
and sandals are black. Red only appears in a few ornamental details
(_Ibid._, Fig. 2). Green is still more rare. It has been found at
Khorsabad. In a fragment of painting upon stucco it affords the ground
against which the figures are relieved;[351] and in the enamelled brick
decoration on the harem wall (Vol. I., Fig. 101), it is used for the
foliage of a tree that looks at first sight like an orange tree; its
leaves however are rather those of an apple (see Plate XV., Fig. 3).
According to Sir H. Layard, the blue which was spread in such great
quantities on the enamelled bricks was given by an oxide of copper
mixed with a little lead, the latter metal being introduced in order to
render the mixture more fusible.[352] This analysis applies only to the
bricks of Nimroud. In the Sargonid period another process, borrowed,
perhaps, from Egypt, seems to have been employed. Place tells us that
in the course of his excavations he found two blocks of colour in one
of the offices at Khorsabad. One of these blocks, weighing some two
pounds and a little over, was blue. An artist was at the time engaged
in copying in water-colours the decoration of one of the walls covered
with enamelled bricks. In order to get as near as possible to the tint
of the original the notion occurred to him to make use of the Assyrian
blue. But the latter was stubborn and would not mix; it left a vitreous
deposit at the bottom of the cup. At first it was supposed that its
long sojourn in the earth had deprived it of some of its qualities,
but later analysis explained the difficulty in a more satisfactory
manner. Its unfitness for use as water-colour was not the result of any
alteration. Being intended for use as a glaze or enamel upon pottery,
it was composed of lapis-lazuli reduced to powder.[353]
[Illustration:
PLATE XIII
From Layard Sulpis sc.
ENAMELLED BRICK FROM NIMROUD
British Museum]
[Illustration:
PLATE XIV.
From Layard Sulpis sc.
1. ENAMELLED BRICK
2. FRAGMENT OF PAINTING ON STUCCO
From Nimroud]
[Illustration:
PLATE XV
After F. Thomas Sulpis sc.
ENAMELLED BRICKS IN THE HAREM
Khorsabad
Imp. Ch. Chardon]
The Chaldæans made a wide use of lapis, which they imported from
central Asia. The fatherland of that mineral is the region now
called Badakshan, in Bactriana, whence, in ancient times, came what
Theophrastus calls the Scythian stone. The caravans brought it into the
upper valley of the Tigris, whence it made its way to Babylon
and even as far as Egypt. The inscriptions of Thothmes III. mention the
good _khesbet_ of Babylon among the objects offered to Pharaoh by
the Rotennou, or people of Syria.[354]
This fine lapis-powder, intimately united with the clay by firing, gave
a solid enamel of a very pure colour. If mixed with a body of some
consistence it might be used upon the sculptures; perhaps the blue with
which certain accessories were tinted was thus obtained.
The yellow is an antimoniate of lead containing a certain quantity of
tin; its composition is the same as that of the pigment now called
Naples yellow.[355] White is an oxide of tin, so that the Arabs do
not deserve the credit they have long enjoyed of being the first,
about the ninth century a.d., to make use of white so composed.[356]
The black is perhaps an animal pigment.[357] The green may have been
obtained by a mixture of blue and yellow pigments, of ochre with oxide
of copper, for instance. As for red, no colour is easier to get. The
Nimroud enamellers used, perhaps, a sub-oxide of copper,[358] while
those of Khorsabad employed the iron oxide of which our red chalk is
composed.[359] We can examine the latter at our ease. The cake of red
found by Place weighed some five-and-forty pounds. It dissolves readily
in water.
The whole palette consisted, then, of some five or six colours,
and their composition was so simple that no attempt to produce an
appearance of reality by their aid could have been successful. Taken
altogether, the painting of Mesopotamia was purely decorative; its
ornamental purpose was never for a moment lost sight of, and the forms
it borrowed from the organic world always had a peculiar character.
When the figures of men and animals were introduced they were never
shown engaged in some action which might of itself excite the curiosity
of the spectator; their forms are not studied with the religious care
that proves the artist to have been impelled by their own beauty and
grace of movement to give them a place in his work. There are no
shadows marking the succession of planes; in the choice of flat tints
the artist has not allowed himself to be tied down to fact. Thus we
find that in the kind of frieze of which we give 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 were so employed they
become pure ornament. In a decoration like that of the archivolts at
Khorsabad (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 expressions 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_.”[360] 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 deprived of their true colours,
and presented to our eyes in a kind of travesty of their real selves.
Things used as ornaments have no inalienable colour of their own;
the decorative artist is free to twist his lines and vary his tints
as he pleases; his work will be judged by the result, and so long as
that is harmonious and pleasing to the eye nothing more is required.
We are tempted, therefore, on the whole, to consider some of those
slabs of faïence upon which nothing appears but certain ornamental
lines and combinations, suggested by geometrical and vegetable forms
but elaborated by his own unaided fancy, as the masterpieces of the
Assyrian enameller. If he had resolutely persevered in this path he
might perhaps have produced something worthy to be compared for grace
and variety with the marvellous faïence of Persia.
[Illustration]