Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/467

 Style anu Execution. 443 landing-place or portal; but in our estimation the conclusions deduced therefrom by M. Dieulafoy are open to question. According to him, the artist represented here the contingents of two different people. The white guard was intended to represent the two principal nations, the Medes and the Persians. On the other hand, the black guard, according to this theory, was recruited in the oudying country of Susiana, and the swarthy colour given them by the painter would coincide with the highly probable con- jecture, which has been independently advanced, that the Elamites belonged to a negroid race.' We fear that it is making too much of what seems to be a mere artistic contrivance. The enamelled panels at Khorsabad exhibit genii painted yellow from head to foot, excepting the hair and beard.* Will it be inferred therefrom that the Assyrians pictured to themselves their gods with a saffron or yellow ochre complexion ? In pictures of this description, it is the outline and not the colour which invests form with its special characteristics, and if used at all, it is merely for the sake of its pleasantness. Dieulafoy seems unconsciously to have felt this, since with the scanty remains of one of the brown heads to hand, he was led to restore one and all with the noble profile tji the Aryan race, such as he found it in the bas-reliefs at Persepolis. Besides, had the intention of the painter been what he is credited with, would not he have modelled a negro's mask, as he did with so sure a hand in the Hall of a Hundred Columns ? According to Herodotus, the Immortals, which Dieulafoy would recpgnize here, were recruited from the Persians alone ;* to none but his countrymen, the scions of the people whose fortunes were intimately bound up with those of the Adiaemenidae, would the king trust the safeguard of his person. But what renders the hypothesis of a negro watch doubtful, is not so much the assertion of the historian as study of the art which created the figures under consideration. The alternation of white and black is a simple means resorted to by the artist for varying the effects. No art has opened its gates wider at all times and places to conventionalism, than that of the enamelllst, and no other has accepted it more easily. Persian sculpture, on the other hand, is by no means destitute of con- ventionalism. Everybody was fully aware that the king was no " Place, Niniee et FAs^^, Pktes XV., XVI. * Heiodotoa, vil 41, 83.
 * DiEULATOV, DtMx&m Rt^pwty pp; 18, 19.