Page:History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 1.djvu/418

 386 SASSANIAN ARCHITECTURE. Part I. in both Eastern and Western styles. Here it arose from an attempt of the architect to carry his third story round the top of the great arch. This is not so evident in the small, as in Flandin and Coste's large drawings,^ but the arches in fact are the same and spaced in the same manner over the arch as in the wings ; but being in brick shafts could not be introduced, and altogether the whole is so clumsy and so tentative that numberless anomalies are everywiiere apparent. The design is novel, and too ambitious to be successful. 263. Elevation of Great Arch of Talc Kesra at Ctesiphon. Scale 50 ft. to 1 in. Though it may not perhaps be beautiful, there is certainly some- thing grand in a great vaulted entrance 72 ft. wide by 85 ft. in height and 115 in de])th, though it makes the doorway at the inner end and all the adjoining parts look extremely small. It Avould have required the rest of the palace to be carried out on an unheard-of scale to compensate for this defect. The Saracenic architects got over the difficulty by making the great portal a semi-dome, and by cutting it up with ornaments and details, so that the doorway looked as large as was required for the space left for it. Hei-e, in the parent form, all is perfectly plain in the interior, and ])ainting alone could have been employed to relieve its nakedness, whichj however, it never Avould have done effectually.^ The ornaments in these and in all the other buildings of the Sassa- nians having been executed in plaster, we should hardly be able to form an idea of the richness of detail they once possessed but for the 1 Flandin and Coste, " Voyage en Perse," vol. iv. pi. 218. '^ These four buildings probably date as near as may be one century from each other, thus — Al Hadhr .... A. n. 2.50 iSerbistan 350 Firouzal)ad . . . A. T). 450 Ctesiphon 5.50 To which we may now add Mashita 620 A bare skeleton, which it will require much time and labor to clothe with flesh and restore to life.