Part 8

In looking at the artistic remains of so remote and strange a civilisation one sometimes wonders how far one can trust one’s æsthetic appreciation to interpret truly the feelings which inspired it. In certain works one cannot doubt that the artist felt just as we feel in appreciating his work. This must, I think, hold on the one hand of the rich ornamental arabesques of Maya buildings or the marvellous inlaid feather and jewel work of either culture; and on the other hand, when we look at the caricatural realistic figures of Truxillo pottery we need scarcely doubt that the artist’s intention agrees with our appreciation, for such a use of the figure is more or less common to all civilisations. But when we look at the stylistic sculpture of Maya and Aztec art, are we, one wonders, reading in an intention which was not really present? One wonders, for instance, how far external and accidental factors may not have entered in to help produce what seems to us the perfect and delicate balance between representational and purely formal considerations. Whether the artist was not held back both by ritualistic tradition and the difficulty of his medium from pushing further the actuality of his presentation--whether, in fact, the artist deplored or himself approved just that reticence which causes our admiration. At times Maya sculpture has a certain similarity to Indian religious sculptural reliefs, particularly in the use of flat surfaces entirely incrusted with ornaments in low relief; but on the whole the comparison is all in favour of the higher æsthetic sensibility of the Maya artists, whose co-ordination of even the most complicated forms compares favourably with the incoherent luxuriance of most Indian work.

In this, as in so many of its characteristics, Maya art comes much nearer to early Chinese sculpture; and again one wonders that such a civilisation should have produced such sensitive and reasoned designs--designs which seem to imply a highly developed self-conscious æsthetic sensibility. Nor do the Maya for all their hieratic ritualism seem to fall into the dead, mechanical repetition which the endless multiplication of religious symbols usually entails, as, for instance, most markedly in Egyptian art. But this strange difference between what we know of Mexican civilisation and what we might have interpreted from the art alone is only one more instance of the isolation of the æsthetic from all other human activities. The Frontispiece to this book gives an example of Maya sculpture from Piedras Negras. Mr. Joyce, in his learned and plausible theory of the dating of Mexican monuments, ascribes these remains to a date of about 50-200 A.D.

They are certainly among the finest remains of Maya sculpture, and this example shows at once the extreme richness of the decorative effect and the admirable taste with which this is co-ordinated in a plastic whole in which the figure has its due predominance. Though the relief of the ornamental part is kept flat and generally square in section, it has nothing of the dryness and tightness that such a treatment often implies.

Mr. Joyce’s books are compiled with amazing industry, and contain a vast accumulation of information. If we have a complaint, it is that for those who are not specialists this information is poured out in almost too uniform a flood, with too little by way of general ideas to enable the mind to grasp or relate them properly. If some of the minor details of obscure proper names had been relegated to the notes, it would have been possible to seize the general outlines more readily. The books are rather for reference than adapted to consecutive reading. In his judgments on the various speculations to which these civilisations have given rise Mr. Joyce is, as one would expect from so careful a scholar, cautious and negative. He does not, as far as I remember, even allude to the theory of the Lost Ten Tribes, but he does condescend to discuss the theory of cultural influence from Eastern Asia which has more than once been put forward by respectable ethnologists. He decides against this fascinating hypothesis more definitely than one would expect--more

definitely, I should say, than the facts before us allow. He declares, for instance, that the calendrical system of Mexico shows no similarity with those of Eastern Asia, whereas Dr. Lehmann gives a circumstantial account of a very curious likeness, the almost exact correspondence of two quite peculiar systems of reckoning. My own bias in favour of the theory of Eastern Asiatic influence is, I confess, based on what may seem very insufficient grounds, namely, the curious likeness of the general treatment of naturalistic forms and the peculiar character of the stylisation of natural forms in early Chinese and American art. It is of course impossible to define a likeness of general character which depends so largely on feeling, but it consists to some extent in the predilection for straight lines and rectangles--a spiral in nature becoming in both early Chinese and American art a sequence of rectangular forms with rounded corners. What is more remarkable is that the further back we go in Chinese art the greater the resemblance becomes, so that a Chou bronze, or still more the carved horns which have survived from the Shang dynasty, are extraordinarily like Maya or Tihuanaco sculpture. Again, it is curious to note how near to early Chinese bronzes are the tripod vases of the Guetar Indians. All these may of course be of quite independent origin, but their similarity cannot be dismissed lightly in view of the long persistence in any civilisation of such general habits of design. Thus the general habits of design of the Cretan civilisation persisted into Greek and even Roman and Christian art; the habits of design of Chinese artists have persisted, though through great modifications, for more than three thousand years. One other fact which may seem almost too isolated and insignificant may perhaps be put forward here. In a history of the Mormons, published in 1851, there is given a figure of an inscribed bronze (see Figure) which was dug up by the Mormons in Utah in 1843. Since Brigham Young pretended to have dug up the original book of Mormon his followers had a superstitious reverence for all such treasure trove, and probably the bronze still exists and might be worth investigation. Now this drawing, here reproduced, looks to me like an extremely bad and unintelligent reproduction of an early Chinese object, in general appearance not unlike certain early pieces of jade. It is fairly certain that at the time the Mormons discovered this, no such objects had found their way out of China, since the interest in and knowledge of this period of Chinese art is of much later growth. So it appears conceivable that the object, whatever its nature, is a relic of some early cultural invasion from Eastern Asia. The physical possibilities of such invasions from the Far East certainly seem to be under-estimated by Mr. Joyce.

THE

MUNICH EXHIBITION OF MOHAMMEDAN ART[18]

It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of this exhibition for those who are interested in the history not alone of Oriental but of European art. Perhaps the most fascinating problem that presents itself to the art historian is that of the origins of mediæval art. Until we understand more or less completely how in the dim centuries of the later Empire and early middle age the great transformation of Græco-Roman into mediæval art was accomplished, we cannot quite understand the Renaissance itself, nor even the form which the whole modern art of Europe has come in the course of centuries to assume. And on this problem the Munich exhibition throws many illuminating sidelights. Early Mohammedan art is seen here to be a meeting point of many influences. There are still traces of the once widespread Hellenistic tradition, though this is seen to be retreating before the refluent wave of aboriginal ideas. Sassanid art had already been the outcome of these contending forces, and the pre-eminence of Sassanid art in forming early Mohammedan styles is clearly brought out in this exhibition. Then there is a constant exchange with Byzantium, and finally continual waves of influence, sometimes fertilising, sometimes destructive, from that great reservoir of Central Asian civilisation, the importance of which is now at last being gradually revealed to us by the discoveries of Dr. Stein, Drs. Lecoq and Grunwedel, and M. Pelliot.

And through this great clearing-house of early Mohammedan art there are signs of influences passing from West to East. The most striking example is that of the plate in cloisonnée enamel from the Landes Museum at Innsbruck. Here we have the one certain example of Mohammedan cloisonnée enamel established by its dedication to a prince of the Orthokid dynasty of the twelfth century. It is extraordinary that this solitary example should alone have survived from what must, judging from the technical excellence of this specimen, have once been a flourishing craft. The general effect of the intricate pattern of animal forms upon a whiteish ground suggests, on the one hand, the earliest examples of Limoges enamels, and on the other the early Chinese, and there can be little doubt that the Chinese did in fact derive their knowledge of cloisonnée, which they themselves called “Western ware,” from these early Mohammedan craftsmen, who had themselves learned the technique from Byzantium.

But on the whole the stream of influence is in the opposite direction, from East to West, and one realises at Munich that in the great period of artistic discovery and formation of styles the near East and the West were developing in closest contact and harmony. Indeed the most fertile, if not actually the most resplendent, period of both arts, was attained whilst they were still almost indistinguishable. If it were not for the habit of these early Mohammedan craftsmen of interweaving inscriptions into their designs, a habit which endears them quite especially to art-historians, how many works of Oriental manufacture would have been ascribed to Europe? In spite of these inscriptions, indeed, such an authority as M. Babelon has sought to place to the account of Western artists the superb cut crystal vessels, of which the noblest example is the inscribed ewer of the tenth century in the treasury of S. Mark’s. Or take again the textiles. In the exhibition there are a number of fragments of textiles of the tenth to the twelfth centuries, in which the general principle of design is the same; for the most part the surface is covered by circular reserves in which severely conventionalised figures of hunters, lions, or monsters are placed in pairs symmetrically confronted. Only minute study has enabled specialists to say that some were made in Sassanid, Persia, some in Byzantium, some in Sicily, and some in Western Europe. The dominant style in all these is again derived from Sassanid art. And here once more one must note the strange recrudescence after so long of Assyrian types and motives, and its invasion of Western Europe, through Byzantium, Sicily, and Spain.

What strikes us most in comparing Græco-Roman art with the new art which gradually emerges in the middle ages is that, on the one hand, we have a series of decorative designs never so remarkable for vitality as for their elegance, and become by the time of the Roman Empire only less perfunctory and mechanical than the patterns of modern times; and on the other hand an art in which the smallest piece of pattern-making shows a tense vitality even in its most purely geometrical manifestations, and the figure is used with a new dramatic expressiveness unhindered by the artist’s ignorance of actual form. Now in the splendid photographs of the Sassanid rock carvings which Dr. Sarre has taken and which are exposed at Munich, we can see something of this process of the creation of the new vital system of design. In the earlier reliefs, those of the time of Sapor, we have, it is true, a certain theatrical splendour of pose and setting, but in the actual forms some flaccidity and inflation. The artists who wrought them show still the predominance of the worn-out Hellenistic tradition which spread in Alexander’s wake over Asia. In the stupendous relief of Chosroes at Tak-i-Bostan, on the other hand, we have all the dramatic energy, the heraldic splendour of the finest mediæval art, and the source of this new inspiration is seen to be the welling up once more of the old indigenous Mesopotamian art. We have once more that singular feeling for stress, for muscular tension, and for dramatic oppositions, which distinguish the bas-reliefs of Babylon and Nineveh from all other artistic expressions of the antique world. It would be possible by the help of exhibits at Munich to trace certain Assyrian forms right through to Mediæval European art. Take, for instance, the lion heads on the pre-Babylonian mace from Goudea in the Louvre; one finds a precisely similar convention for the lion head on the Sassanid repoussé metalwork found in Russia. Once again it occurs in the superb carved rock crystal waterspout lent by the Karlsruhe Museum (Room 54), and one finds it again on the font of Lincoln Cathedral and in the lions that support the doorway columns of Italian cathedrals. In all these there is a certain community of style, a certain way of symbolising the leonine nature which one may look for in vain in Greek and Græco-Roman art.

Even if this seem too forced an interpretation of facts, it is none the less clear that everywhere in early Mohammedan art this recrudescence of Assyrian forms may be traced, and that their influence was scarcely less upon Europe than upon the near East. Dr. Sarre has taken a tracing of the pattern which is represented in low relief upon the robes of Chosroes in the Tak-i-Bostan relief. In South Kensington Museum there is an almost identical piece of silk brocade which actually comes from the ruins of Khorsabad, and in the same museum one may find more than one Byzantine imitation of this design and closely similar ones made in Sicily; and the conventional winged monster which forms the basis of these designs has a purely Assyrian air.

In Egypt, too, it would seem that there was before the Arab invasion a marked recrudescence of indigenous native design which enabled the Coptic craftsmen gradually to transform the motives given to them by Roman conquerors into something entirely non-Hellenistic. And the incredible beauty of the Fatimite textiles of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, of which a few precious relics are shown in Room 17, preserve something, especially in the bird forms, of this antique derivation.

But to return once more to Sassanid art. The specimens from the Hermitage and Prince Bobrinsky’s collections form an object lesson of extraordinary interest in the development of early Mohammedan art. They have inherited and still retain that extreme realisation of massive splendour, that fierce assertion of form and positive statement of relief which belongs to the art of the great primitive Empires, and most of all to the art of Mesopotamia, and yet they already adumbrate the forms of Mohammedan art into which they pass by insensible degrees. Here, too, we find vestiges of the dying Hellenistic tradition. One of Prince Bobrinsky’s bronzes, a great plate, has, for instance, a design composed of classic vases, from which spring stems which bend round into a series of circles, a design which might almost be matched as regards form, though not as regards spirit, in the wall decorations of Pompeii. Or take again the superb repoussé silver plate representing a Sassanid king spearing a lion. Here the floating drapery of the king and the edge of his tunic show a deliberately schematised rendering of the traditional folds of the Greek peplos. But how much more Assyrian than Greek is the whole effect--the dramatic tension of the figures expressed by an emphasis on all the lines of muscular effort, as in the legs of the horse and the lions. How Assyrian, too, is the feeling for relief, and the predilection for imbricated or closely set parallel lines as in the lions’ manes. In the conventional rock under one of the lions one seems to see also a hint of Chinese forms.

Still more Assyrian is another plate, the arrangement of which recalls the reliefs of Assurbanipal or Sennacherib, and yet already there are forms which anticipate Mohammedan art; the gate of the city, its crenelations, and the forms of the helmets of the soldiers, all have an air of similarity with far later Mohammedan types. Another plate, not reproduced here, shows a Sassanid king regaling himself with wine and music, and gives already more than a hint of the favourite designs of the Rhages potters or the bronze workers of Mossoul.

Among Prince Bobrinsky’s bronzes which were found in the Caucasus is a late Sassanid aquamanile in the form of a bird. It is already almost Mohammedan, though retaining something of the extreme solidity and weight of earlier art. Once more, in the aggressive schematisation of the form of the tail and the suggestion of feathers by a series of deeply marked parallel lines, we get a reminiscence of Assyrian art, while in the treatment of the crest there is the more florid interweaving of curves which adumbrate not only Mohammedan but Indian forms.

In the aquamanile in the form of a horse (see Plate) the Sassanid influence is still predominant, but there can be no doubt that this is already Mohammedan, probably of the eighth or ninth century. We have already here the characteristics of Fatimite bronzes, of which a few specimens are shown at Munich. The great griffin of Pisa could not, of course, be moved from the Campo Santo, nor are the two specimens in the Louvre shown, but the stag from the Bavarian National Museum is there and affords a most interesting comparison with Prince Bobrinsky’s horse. Both have the same large generalisation of form, and in both we have the curious effect of solidity and mass produced by the shortened hind legs, with the half-squatting movement to which that gives rise.

The Bobrinsky horse is obviously more primitive, and probably indicates the beginnings of a school of bronze plastic in Mesopotamia

nearly parallel to that of Egypt. This school, however, never developed as fully along sculptural lines, and at a comparatively early date abandoned sculpture for the art of bronze inlay, of which Mossoul was the great centre in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In the incised designs on the horse we have an example of the early forms of the palmette ornament and of the interlacing curves which form the basis of most subsequent Mohammedan patterns. Within the reserves formed by the _intreccie_ are small figures, of which one--that of a man seated and playing the lute--can just be made out in the reproduction. It is already typical of the figure design which the Mohammedan artists developed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

By way of comparison with this Mesopotamian example, Plate, Fig. 2, shows a supreme example of Fatimite sculpture of the twelfth century. It is, indeed, a matter for regret that Mohammedan artists so soon abandoned an art for which they showed such extraordinary aptitude. The lion which comes from the Kassel Museum has already been published by M. Migeon,[19] but is of such rare beauty and interest in relation to the Sassanid works here described that it seemed desirable to reproduce it again. It shows the peculiar characteristics of all the art produced for the Fatimite court, its exquisite perfection and refinement of taste, its minuteness of detail and finish together with a large co-ordination of parts, a rhythmic feeling for contour and the sequence of planes, which have scarcely ever been equalled. And all these qualities of refinement, almost of sophistication, which Fatimite art possesses, do not, as we see here, destroy the elementary imaginative feeling for the vitality of animal forms. In the case in which this masterpiece of Mohammedan sculpture is shown there is also seen the celebrated lion which once belonged to the painter Fortuny. Noble though this is in general conception, the coarseness of its workmanship and the want of subtlety in its proportions, in comparison with the Kassel lion, makes it evident that it is not from the same school of Egyptian craftsmen, but probably of Spanish origin.

Yet another of the Bobrinsky bronzes of about the same date as the horse is already typically Mohammedan as may be seen by the leaf forms and the _intreccie_ of the crest, but how much of the antique Sassanid proportions and sense of relief is still retained! It is believed to be from Western Turkestan and of the eighth or ninth century. One must suppose that Sassanid forms travelled North and East as well as South and West, and helped in the formation of that Central Asian art which becomes the dominant factor in the later centuries of Mohammedan, more especially of Persian, art.

Before leaving the question of Sassanid influences I must mention the series of bronze jugs in the Bobrinsky and Sarre collections. The general form is obviously derived from classic originals, but they have a peculiar spout of a rectangular shape placed at right angles on the top of the main opening. The effect of this is to give two openings, one for pouring the water in, the other for pouring it out at right angles. Now in the early Mossoul water jugs we see numerous examples of what are clearly derivations of this form passing by gradual degrees into the familiar neck with spout attached but not separated, which is typical of later Mohammedan water jugs. This evolution can be traced step by step in the Munich Exhibition, and leaves no doubt of the perfect continuity of Sassanid and Mohammedan forms.[20]