Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/519

 General Characteristics of Persian Art. 495 is either Iran, Assyria, or Egypt ; they were touched up, however, corrected, and embellished in Uie country of their adoption by the happy knack of a chisel more skilful and delicate than that which first modelled them either in wood, clay, or stone. To use the language of grammarians, we are faced here by Hellenisms which impart to the style of these monuments a complexion and tinge sui gaurist though preserving in the main, both as to style and substance, a thorough Asiatic and Eastern character. Thus the buildings of Persia, be it from the artificial mounds whereon they are placed, the stairs by which they are approached, their mode of construction, the enormous masses of pisS which constitute their thick walls, are allied to the traditions of Assyrian architecture. As a rule the building material Greece employed was dressed stone. The first outline of the hypostyle hall may perhaps have been suggested by the wooden house of Northern Media, whose ceiling was upheld by the trunks of trees, eight or ten in number ; but its stupendous proportions and the development of the pillars supporting its roof, multiplied tenfold at Persepolis and Susa — that is to say, which rose to seventy-two or a hundred — were copied on the models of Egypt. In any case, nothing of the kind occurs in Greece. Her architects place their columns outside the building, along a wall so as to form a portico, or in the interior to divide the cella in several naves ; and their roof does not rest upon an indefinite numbier of pillars with a quincunx arrangement The large place enamels held at Susa will be remembered ; and we may safely conclude that they also figured at Persepolis. Now, th is is a mode of decoration which Greece never employed ; it belongs to countries such as Chaldsea, where houses are built of mud. As to sculpture, its themes and symbols, the way the figures are distributed about the building, everything bears the stamp of the habits and the taste of the plastic art of Assyria. The share of Greece in the education of the sculptor is only perceptible to a well-trained eye ; it only betrays itself in the quality of the work, in nice delicate touches, in a certain suppleness one did not expect to find here. The deduction to be drawn from a critical analysis of Persian art is that, unlike that of Egypt and Chalda.'a, it is not the spon- taneous expression of the ideas and the beliefs of a great people. It is the last comer of the arts of Anterior Asia ; and its inspirations are derived from the types created by its predecessors, and the Digitized by Google