Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/107

 94 History of Art in Antiquity. peculiar to the palm with the same fidelity as his confreres of Egypt and Assyria.* His was a free copy made upon models more realistic and nearer to nature, in which his fancy prompted him to introduce ornament — the reel and bead, for example — which further detracts from the resemblance it ought to have to a vegetable form and makes its reading difficult. The manner the cylindrical capital was united with the shaft was exceedingly happy, but its mode of attachment to the upper crowning members of the column, was as clumsy as that of the latter, in the type just described. This the architect may have dis« covered and striven to remedy, but his attempts, whatever they were, are lost to us, so that we have no means of testing them, although we have the final result in the transition form interposed between the two capitals, a prism, which is allied to both, and surrounded by adjuncts wherein flowing lines predominate. The form in question consists of narrow pilasters, which, springing from the summit of the quarter round, from behind the ovolo ornament so to speak, are disposed somewhat in the shape of a cross in horizontal section. Superimposed volutes play the part of base and capital on each face. Flutes separat(d by fillets scar the face of these pillars as well as the pulvinus of ihe scrolls.' Considered as a whole, the arrangement of the double set of volutes is not without analogy with that of the Greek prothyride (order reversed), with this difference that the Persian spires, like those of the Ionic capital, are symmetrically arranged ; e.g. all the scrolls are turned one way. aiul not op[)osed to each other as in the Greek example. Then, too, the connecting line is horizontal in the latter instance and vertical in the former, an arrangement e.xhibited in the architecture of no other nation. If the per- pendicular ami lateral situation assigned to the volute is apt to startle one, it is not only Ix cause our eye is more accustomed to the Greek mode in the buildings around us, as that the strangeness of the device is so grt^at, notal)ly the lower, as to make it hard to understand its movements, or conceive from what animal or vegetable form it could have originated. When scrolls apjiear in the Ionic column, they fold round the echinus and necking after the fashion of the rich curly hair about a young girl's face ; at least, such was tlie image they awoke in the playful fancy of ' ///(/. of Art, toin. t. p;> 556, 557, 583, FigS. 337, 348. Digitized by Google
 * Ch. CHIPIE2, Hist. (niiqtu p.