Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/154

 Decoration. 143 When we have summed up the analogies which, in our estimation, exist between the lower part of the Persepolitan capital and the head of the palm, the list— a mighty short one — of the forms which the creators of the royal architecture of the Achaemenidae derived from the vegetable kingdom will be complete. Nor is there <:,'reater variety in the motives taken from the fauna. Selec- tion of types and HKxle of inter- pretation, every- thing recalls the culture of those empires that were the pre- decessors of Persia. In his portrayal of a living creature the artist docs not seem to have gone to nature, and he has scarcely taken more trouble with those fan- tastic animals, uniting the attri- butes of diHerent species, which he often introduced into his decoration. The lion and the bull perpetually recur at Persepolis. Is it necessary to re.iuiiui the reader of the large place they occupy in the art productions of Chaldiea, Assyria, Phtx-nicia, and Asia Minor, where they figure as embellishments to edifices, textile fabrics, artistic furniture, arms, judge from the shape of the fruit, it may be a pine or cypress. I should say the former, in that its pyramidal shape and cones are precisely those of the figure, and pmnt to a cleodara, a tree that grows all over Afghanistan. On the other hand, the cedar of Lebanon, which furnished Eastern nations with timber for their con- structions, is certainly pyramidal when young." To the above bints may be objected that the larch and the cedar are not indigenous trees of Fars — at any rate, at the present day ; so that, tu accept M. Franchet's views, we must suppose the said trees to have disappeared since antiquity. Fit]. 69. — lVrv|>olis. I'aiacc .No. 2. CrowniriKo Flandi.n and Cu!>tk, Plate XXXVllI.