The ancient writers often mention and praise the Assyrian tissues for the art employed in their manufacture; for the splendour and harmony of their colours, and the richness of the fanciful compositions with which they were embroidered. The mystical figures of bucentaurs, lions, dragons, unicorns, and other monsters, which the authors describe, are absolutely identical with those which we see on the bas-reliefs of Nimroud and Khorsabad. But this identity was not in the subjects alone. There is no doubt that the manner of treatment, the _style_ of these subjects, was identical with that of the objects embroidered on the tissues, which ancient authors have described. On examining somewhat attentively the Assyrian sculptures, it is easy to satisfy oneself that the art of the Assyrian sculptor moved within limits traceable from its origin, viz., embroidered work, allowance being made for certain alterations of style, caused by the requirements of a new material. One perceives in these Assyrian sculptures, the desire on the artist’s part of an attention to the truth of Nature, but that he has been hindered in his task, not—as with the Egyptians—by a regular hieroglyphic system and hieratical laws, but rather by the caprices of a method difficult, and indeed foreign to sculpture, the influence of which was still strongly felt. Thus the sculpture of this people kept itself within the bounds of a very low and flat relief, exactly similar to that of some productions of Chinese woven work, seen in the Great Exhibition of 1851, which possessed peculiar interest in the history of Art, inasmuch as they exhibited the transition of the high woof into polychromic bas-relief. The Assyrian figures, without being embalmed mummies like those of Egypt, show, nevertheless, much stiffness and irregularity; they appear as it were imprisoned and confined within an invisible canvas. Their contours are, so to speak, tacked in with threads. One recognises in them an awkwardness and hardness arising from the contest of the artist with a material foreign to the style: whilst the Egyptian bas-reliefs evince an original, canonical, and voluntary stiffness. I am tempted to believe that all those slabs of alabaster from Assyria, with their religious, warlike, and domestic scenes, are nothing more than exact copies in stone, after originals in tissues, at that time celebrated and executed by good native artists, who worked on that material only, whilst they employed mere workmen to transfer the originals on to stone, as well as the material would allow, which explains the difference between the design and execution which these works betray. This same character is also found on the Assyrian paintings.