Inventing Assyria: exoticism and reception in nineteenth-century England and France

As the Assyrian artifacts were promulgated in England, they were frequently made to carry nationalistic and antiquarian value, as in France, as well as religious significance, a development unique to the English situation. The discussion in both countries, however, nearly always included the inevitably controversial question of the aesthetic value of the works.

For instance, an exhaustive review of Layard's book in the upper-class Quarterly Review, which covers all the themes mentioned above, is framed with the aesthetic evaluation of the objects. It begins by singling out "the huge lion and bull" as "by far the most remarkable and characteristic specimens of Assyrian art." These works

impressed us with a strange, gigantic majesty, a daringness of conception, which was in no way debased by the barbaric rudeness of the execution, and on the other hand enhanced by its singular symbolic attributes. It is that kind of statue which it takes away one's breath to gaze on.(60)

Forty-odd pages later the reviewer has regained his breath, and adds that Assyrian works are nonetheless inferior to the "true beauty" and "exquisite anthropomorphism" of the Greeks. Even so, he counts the discoveries as a new chapter in the history of art.

The Quarterly Review writer, reacting viscerally to an object that refuses to obey reigning doctrines of sculpture in such matters as scale, finish, subject, and composition, exemplifies a position of ambivalence toward the Assyrian works The writer is caught in the binary evaluation of the objects, between a tantalizingly aesthetic and a dutifully antiquarian appraisal of the works. Yet this is already a position of far more aesthetic sympathy to Assyria than that of Rawlinson or of others even more closely associated with the British Museum.

The immense popularity of the Assyrian works (and the insistence of the museum's parliamentary overseers) kept them on public display, ultimately in new galleries designed especially for them.(61) Even so, a number of the museum's own trustees were downright hostile to the works One trustee deemed them "a parcel of rubbish" belonging "at the bottom of the sea."(62) The testimony of Sir Richard Westmacott, Sr., elaborates on the position. A professor of sculpture at the British Royal Academy since 1827, Westmacott had served for decades as the "sculpture advisor" to the museum's trustees. He was present at official meetings and, as the minutes confirm, held considerable sway in decisions about sculptural display. Asked by a parliamentary commission in 1853 about the artistic worth of the Assyrian discoveries, Westmacott responded with an opinion even more aesthetically denigrating than Rawlinson. Specifically distinguishing them from the Elgin Marbles, which are valuable for "their excellence as works of art," he stated:

The Nineveh Marbles are very curious, and it is very desirable to possess them, but I look upon it that the value of the Nineveh Marbles will be the history that their inscriptions, if they ever are translated, will produce; because if we had one-tenth part of what we have of Nineveh art it would be quite enough as specimens of the arts of the Chaldeans, for it is very bad art. . . . The less people as artists, look at objects of that kind, the better.(63)