This exclusively official side of the Ninevite sculptures compelled art to confine itself to abstract types, created once for all, which, multiplied to satiety, produce a certain fatigue in our minds. There is no more [Illustration: Fig. 74.--Siege of a fortress (Bas-relief from Khorsabad, Louvre).] proportion or scale in the Assyrian bas-reliefs than among the Egyptians or the Chinese; perspective is absent, or rather the artists made vain efforts to calculate and reproduce its effects. Men are taller than the chariots that they mount and the horses which draw them; they even overtop the fortresses that they besiege. As in Egypt, the king is always represented as taller than his ministers, and in general the Assyrians are taller than their enemies. Greek heroes, in classical art, are also often taller than the warriors who surround them; the same facts have been remarked in Chinese art. The practice is naïve, but it is common to all arts and easily explained by the absence of perspective. At the present day, when our artists can at their pleasure arrange several planes in their pictures, and produce distances and backgrounds in the scenes which they wish to render, they are satisfied to make the important scene stand out and place the principal actors in the foreground. Before perspective was understood and many planes could thus be created, there was no means of bringing out the principal actors except the device of a disproportionate enlargement. Generally speaking, the Assyrian artist shows a fondness for picturesque spots, mountains, and rivers. But he renders them with the strangest errors in the relative proportions of the objects: for instance, the fish among the waves are as large as the boats; the birds in the forests are as large as the trees or the hunters; the vultures on the field of battle are as big as the horses. [Illustration: Fig. 75.--Navigation scene (Bas-relief from Khorsabad, Louvre).] When the artist wishes to reproduce the human countenance, he always places the eye in full, even when the face is in profile. When the sculptor is obliged to represent his figures in full face, or in any other attitude than the simple profile, he is much embarrassed, and shows his hesitation and his incapacity; unable to foreshorten the feet, he draws them entirely in profile, while the whole of the upper portion of the body is in full face--an error which gives an appearance of dislocation to the figure. He turns the heads round as if they were put on the wrong way; the hands present the same deformity: it might sometimes be supposed that the artist has put them on backwards.