Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/472

 448 History of Art in Antiquity. was neither the sole nor the chief mistress of Persian art What it knows, and it knows a good deal, is mainly due to the teaching of its predecessor of Asia, and its contemporary, the Ionian sculptor. Its faults are those of a pupil who felt embarrassed how to choose between two masters who were not always agreed, or perhaps because their models were not such as he could blindly follow. In the first instance he had to select, and his choice was not always happy. Many an Assyrian bas-relief would have set him on the right track for placing the eye in profile when required; but he preferred to follow the example of Greek art, which, down to the sixth century b.c, persists, even in the best-executed stelas, in drawing the eye like an untutored child.* If elsewhere, in a vain attempt to present his figures in the graceful freedom of ordinary life, he has given them instead a painful attitude, it is because a natural posture was not to be found either in the monuments of Assyria or the early works of Greece. In both all the subjects of a processional scene have invariably their heads and feet turned in the direction towards which they advance. To settle uncertainties and faults such as these, the artist should have gone straight to Nature ; but he was not in the habit of consulting her; all he cared to obtain from her were accessories and mere detail. Thus he faithfully copied the head-dress, the cut of the robe, the weapons, and equip- ment, as he saw them about him ; but his canon of proportions, and even his notion of beauty, were borrowed from alien sources. When an art had to be created on the spot to adorn and add to the dignity of the young royal establishment in upstart Persia (which was but of yesterday), agents were recruited from all parts to satisfy as quickly as possible the whim of a sovereign whose will was law. This historians have incidentally told us ; but even without their testimony we should have gathered as much from the monuments themselves. We should like to know the names of the principal architects and the ornamentists of these buildings, or at least to what race they belonged. Our curiosity, however, will never be satisfied. Though sorry for ourselves, we must be content with defining the peculiar conditions which circumstances brought to bear upon this nascent art, and showing how it applied forms previously created to new themes and the representa- ' Lcx>k, for instance, at the atda of Ariston, commonly dated from the sixth century, which goes bjr the name of the *' Marathon Warrior." Digitized by Google