Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/504

 48o History of Art in Antiquity. he was held back by no such restraint in his treatment of geome- trical forms, when he allowed his imagination free play without troubling himself as to reality. Here fancy reigned supi^me ; it regulated the selection of tones, and whilst working out the general, arrangement of the design, it felt no scruple in now and again replacing one colour by another in the several sections of the work. Fig. 253 is an instance of. this mode of procedure ; it consists of two fragments which seem to have belonged to the upper part of a panel where the decoration, entirely composed of linear elements^ recalls a floor made up of several kinds of stone. The appearance of the piece is so peculiar that at' first sight one might be tempted to think it older than the archers and the lions. This seemingly more primitive aspect, due to the triangles opposed to one another, does not stand the test of narrow inspection. The a>lours are identical with those of the figured panels, and the terminal scroll is very like that which encloses the lions and the Archers' Frieze, whilst the tracing exhibits even greater refinement and elegance (Fig. 68 and Plate XL). The inference to be drawn, therefore, is that they are all of one age; but as they were to occupy different situations in the build- ing, the ornamentist dexterously availed himsc^lf of each and every device it is possible to employ in the kind of decoration, in order to introduce variety into his scheme. The Persian enamel- list did not travel beyond the vegetable kingdom and geometrical forms. He discarded the figure, a determination no doubt induced by the severity of the law of Islam, which forbids the representa- tion of living forms. His predecessor had not been shackled by any such prejudice; his taste, therefore, could be exercised on broader lines. Hence his figures in nobleness of style can chal- lenge comparison with those chiselled on limestone. Then, too, the forms he derived from a free interpretation of leafage and flowers have more variety than those of the Persian enamellist. Of the tnith of this the reader can convince himself, by turning to the palms (Figs. 66, 67), the rosettes (Figs. 64, 251), and the scrolls (Figs. 68, 253, and Plate XL). Side by side with these we find linear ornament in its simplest form — the tooth device, for ex- ample (Fig. 67), triangles opposed to each other (Fig. 252), bars and circles with concentric rings of many hues (Fig. 67), arrow- heads and the like (Fig. 62), which the decorator uses in swift succession. Thus, both at Susa (Fig. 178) and Persepolis (Figs. Digitized by Google