Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/118

 The Column. 105 coips, whilst the grassy fields of Azerbijan furnished excellent horses for the cavahy.^ We cannot wonder, therefore, that the architects of Cyrus and Darius, whilst changing their working materials, should have derived their inspirations from the palace at Ecbatana and the buildings of the like nature they might have chanced to see in other cities of Media. Though they preserved the wooden loft, they carved the column in stone and were thus able to add to its altitude and secure for it a longer existence. In each and all the architectures, whether Egyptian, Persian, Greek, or Gothic, which have made use of the column, this, as a human being, appears with an individuality and physiognomy of its own, the character of which is determined less by details and subordinate forms, such as the presence or absence of flutes, the profile of base and capital, than a thorough coincidence of the parts and harmony of proportion. But the Persian column, no matter the dimensions it may assume, even when composed of enormous blocks of limestone tapering towards the apex, preserves through- out the mark of its origin; we feel that this was timber, its legitimate ancestor some cypress more than a hundred years old, which, on the order of Dejoces or Phraortes, fell by the axe of the wood-cutter on the timbered heights of Elburz or Zagros. That which is more difficult to find out is how the idea ever entered the mind of the artist of composing a capital with elements and a mode of grouping them together such as we find here. In the first place, it may be observed that the capping of both the Mazanderan (Fig. 39) and the Ispahan column (Fig. 40) exhibits a form which roughly recalls that of the Persepolitan capital. In the former, they are tablets broadening as they rise towards the loft ; in the latter, it is a transverse timber- piece placed at the summit of the shaft, .something in the shape of a cross. The beam, which in both instances plays the part of architrave, is more apt to give way under the burden of the roof than would a stone of the same dimension ; this was as well understood by the rustic builder as by the scientific archi- tect of the brilliant capital, and each tried in his own way, to reduce as much as possible the width between the columns across which the beams would be carried. The marked tendency of the terminal members to spread out in the direction of the architrave is only to be explained on a utilitarian principle. The ' Herodotus, i. 135 3 Strabo, XI. xiii. 9. Digitized by Google