Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/119

 io6 History op Art iH Antiquity. Persian capital likewise upheld a wooden loft, a fiict which involved a rectangular shape very distinct from the Egyptian and Grecian capital. A similar disposition, suggested or rather rendered inevitable by the nature of the materials, could not but tax the ingenuity of the architect as to the best means of turning it to advantage and transforming it into a decorative element. But why was his choice fixed upon a motive to which he remained faithful from first to last ? Why have placed couchant quadrupeds, unicorns and bulls, at the summit of the shaft ? If other and more primitive shapes existed, they have not been found, and as all the columns at Meshed-i*MQrghab have lost their capitals, we are left in igno- rance as to the mode of junction between shaft and entablature in the early palaces of Persia. Some day, perhaps, excavations will enable us to recover, in the rubbish, some fragment of the order that would tell us if the Persian artists invented this singular type at once, or by degrees and after many essayals. In the latter case we should, no doubt, learn much it were useful to know, and this or that characteristic might give us the clue and serve as guide in our researches backwards, when, perhaps, we should have to seek in some older art the antecedents and the connecting link of the younger form. Unfortunately such a resource as this is denied the historian ; he has to deal with facts as they are, and in the present instance the capital we are considering is only found at Persepolis, in those buildings that date from the reign of Darius, where long usage had already fixed its composition and leading lines, which it preserved to the last day of its existence. Our inability to lay hold of the type in its nascent state, so to speak, adds not a little to the onus of our inquiry and renders conjecture more uncertain. Our first thought naturally turns to Assyria, where the capital already exhibits a complexity and crowding of forms which tend to widen the tablet whereon will rest the architrave ; * but it lacks the semi-bulls as crowning members of the support — a feature, as far as we know, proper to Persia, but which we cannot help thinking was mainly derived from, or helped at least by the models of Assyria. Our advance, albeit unconfirmed by data from the ruinous palaces of Mesopotamia or the architectural repre- ' Hist, of Art, torn. ii. Figs. 41, 42. Digitized by Google