Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/421

 TlIBUBS AND THEIR SITUATIONS. 399 ments. There he challenges admiration, whether he is represented seated on his throne under a sumptuous canopy, his mighty host ranged below in battle array (Fig. 156), or carried on the out- stretched arms of his subjects, as on the sepulchral fa9ades (Fig. 190), or, erect, about to pass behind the veil of his portal, with an escort of eight men holding parasol and fly-chaser above his head (Fig. 191), or plunging his ds^er in the flank of monsters inimical to man (Figs. 71, 72). The two orders of pictures appear externally on the face of the platform, and internally about the doorways of the palaces of Darius and Xerxes. As to the two great throne-rooms, the one is with- out doorways, and the other is destitute of stairs and sustaining walls. These enormous edifices, therefore, exhibit but one-half of the decorative scheme — we had almost said, one of the twin chapters composing the book ; but this unique chapter is written with more amplitude than could be effected in the narrower limits of the buildings of minor dimensions. The fields made over to the sculptor are more spacious, so that he could translate his con- ception with a greater number of figures, and thereby infuse more* variety of expression. The Hall of a Hundred Columns exhibits the finest examples of those groups where the royal figure, recog nizable by his loftier stature and attributes, is the central or highest point of the group. In front of the Great Hall of Xerxes, on the other hand, on die face of its substructure, the favourite theme of Persian statuary is seen at its best — ^tliat in which every- thing tells of the monarch without actually introducing him. The wall extending between its four flights is double the length of that of the inhabited palaces, for these have only two flights apiece, and lofty enough to have been divided into three bands or compart- ments, so that the figures displayed here may be counted, not singly or by the dozen, but by hundreds. This it is which has enabled the artist to aim at an altogether different effort of inven- tion than in those monuments where space was doled out to him with a sparing hand. The highest of the three rows is in a deplorable mutilated state, and unaccompanied, as at BehistOn, by an inscription. Despite it all, it is quite easy to grasp the general drift of the vast composition, rolled out sixty metres in length. The landing-place is the ideal centre of the picture. The two processions, both the figures mounting the steps and those in the horizontal bands of the wall, face each other and approach towards Digitized by Google