Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/174

 Vaulted Structures. compel the admiration of all those who visit them. Hence a continuous transmission and progressive development of the arch system would have been in force along with the cupola built on a square plan ; the work, begun perhaps even before Cyrus, and carried on by his successors, furnished the Byzantine builders with the first elements of dispositions which characterize their most celebrated works — St. Sophia, for example — and which have served as models to the art of the West Like all theories intent upon establishing a relation of cause and effect between disjointed and consequently unexplained phenomena* it is most fascinating; but this makes us all the more cautious to examine whether the facts are exactly as they have been made to appear, and whether they do not admit of a somewhat different interpretation. In the first places we deem it of no little importance to have the question properly stated. In the second place, we wish it to be fully understood that the remarks and reserves about to follow are not addressed to M. Choisy, whose conclusions, embodied in his beautiful work VArl de b&iir^ we are quite prepared to endorse; our only point of contention bears upon the age assigned by Dieulafoy to the cupola monuments of Feruz-Abad, Sarvistan, and Ferash-Abad. If the date is to be fixed by specious conjecture, the only way is not only to take into account the fact that inscriptions occur in the Persepolitan and not in the Susian palaces, but every data to be gleaned from plan, material, and decoration of the respective structures. Application of this method has led Dieulafoy to date the palace at Sarvistan, seemingly the younger of the two, " in the reign of the last Achsemenidae, or perhaps the Seleucida! ; " as to FerQz-Abad, " older by a hundred and fifty or two hundred years, it was due to a satrap of Xerxes or the first Artaxerxes." ' The fact that the ornamental plaster at Feruz-Abad reproduces characteristic features exhibited in the Persepolitan decoration is explained on the supposition of a later interpolation, when a more refined taste induced the owner to mask the barbarous masonr}', so as to bring the edifice in accord with the taste of the day. In this case, he adds, " the body of the edifice may go back to the age oi and 25 plates. Consult, above all, chap, xiv^ ** Essai htstorique, § z ; Origine des m^ihodes." i^i^iu^cd by Google
 * Adgvstb Croisv, LAft de bdUr €ka Us BytoHHtu, 4th edit, x88a, 187 pages
 * Dieulafoy, L'Art antigutf iv. 75*