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Updated: June 21, 2025
J.P. Peters gave a very instructive exposition of the chronology of the kings of Assyria, their social and religious customs and ceremonies, their methods of warfare, their systems of architecture, etc. He stated that the finest Assyrian bass-reliefs in the British Museum came from the same palace as this specimen, the carving of which is not excelled by any period of the ancient glyptic art.
The narrow and curving, but not crooked streets, with the blazing sun of that Neapolitan November falling into them, or clouding their wheel-worn lava with the black, black shadows of the many-tinted walls; the houses, and the gay columns of white, yellow, and red; the delicate pavements of mosaic; the skeletons of dusty cisterns and dead fountains; inanimate garden spaces with pygmy statues suited to their littleness; suites of fairy bed-chambers, painted with exquisite frescos; dining-halls with joyous scenes of hunt and banquet on their walls; the ruinous sites of temples; the melancholy emptiness of booths and shops and jolly drinking-houses; the lonesome tragic theatre, with a modern Pompeian drawing water from a well there; the baths with their roofs perfect yet, and the stucco bass-reliefs all but unharmed; around the whole, the city wall crowned with slender poplars; outside the gates, the long avenue of tombs, and the Appian Way stretching on to Stabiae; and, in the distance, Vesuvius, brown and bare, with his fiery breath scarce visible against the cloudless heaven; these are the things that float before my fancy as I turn back to look at myself walking those enchanted streets, and to wonder if I could ever have been so blest.
The bass-reliefs of another peristyle represent a combat between the king of apes and the king of angels, and if not the death, at least the defeat, of the former. On an adjoining slab is a boat filled with stalwart rowers with long beards, a group very admirable in attitude and expression. In fact, it is in these bass-reliefs that the greatest delicacy of touch and the finest finish are manifest.
Ruth sat down in a great carved arm-chair beside the fire. The hall was only lighted by a few tall lamps high on pedestals against the walls, which threw great profiles of the various busts upon the dim bass-reliefs of twining scroll-work; and Dare, with his eyes fixed on Ruth, began to play. There is in some music a strange appeal beyond the reach of words.
On the back of this there is a bass-relief in bronze, representing the Nativity a work much in the spirit of the bass-reliefs in San Giovanni e Paolo; and one of the chapels has an exquisite little altar, with gleaming columns of porphyry.
Peter's Church; circuses where, it is said, three hundred and eighty-five thousand spectators could witness the games and chariot-races at a time; bridges, still standing, which have furnished models for the most beautiful at Paris and London; aqueducts carried over arches one hundred feet in height, through which flowed the surplus water of distant lakes; drains of solid masonry in which large boats could float; pillars more than one hundred feet in height, coated with precious marbles or plates of brass, and covered with bass-reliefs; obelisks brought from Egypt; fora and basilicae connected together, and extending more than three thousand feet, in length, every part of which was filled with "animated busts" of conquerors, kings, and statesmen, poets, publicists, and philosophers; mausoleums greater and more splendid than that Artemisia erected to the memory of her husband; triumphal arches under which marched in stately procession the victorious armies of the Eternal City, preceded by the spoils and trophies of conquered empires, such was the proud capital a city of palaces, a residence or nobles who were virtually kings, enriched with the accumulated treasures of ancient civilization.
Nor do all the riches of the choir those multitudes of singing angels, those Ascensions and Assumptions, and innumerable bass-reliefs of gleaming marble moulded into softest wax by mastery of art distract our eyes from the single round medallion, not larger than a common plate, inscribed by him upon the front of the high-altar.
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