Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/116

 The Column. had aimed at copying the royal palaces of their predecessors, they would have raised at the foot of the citadel a building with thick walls, in which sculptures on stone or enamelled brick would have been the chief ornament Now, could aught be conceived more unlike those mounds of sun-dried day than the palace at Ecbatana, with its elegant proportions and light constructions largely made up of woods ; about which, too^ were lavished the precious metals, in the shape of ornamental leaves and plaques ? Some notion of the aspect the royal residence presented may be gained from certain modem build- ings of Persia ; such would be the Chehl- Sutun, or Palace of Forty Columns, built by Shah Hussein, the last of the Sofis. Its principal apartment is a great hall, or talar, which opens on the porch; eighteen ele- gant wooden pillars support the roof (Fig. 40). The entire building, ex- cept the cornice, where a tinted wood inlay forms a kind of mosaic, is covered with pieces of glass, lozenge shaped. The ceilings, divided into compartments, are also enriched with embossed glass and prisms of crystal. The woods here are not - rev^ted in the same way as at Ecbatana, but their arrangement is identicaL The resemblance is further increased by the tarnished appearance of the tin foil, which makes the tiny glass plaques look like burnished and oxidized silver. It certainly is curious that we should be able to name, at an interval of so many centuries, two edifices on Median soil whose construction and decoration were on precisely the same lines. The analogy extends to details not void of interest; thus lions, their heads turned in different t'lG. 40.— Th« MifTon' Pavilion, Ispahan. Partial section. Flamdin uid Costs. JknetmtuHmt Plate XXXIV.