Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/524

 History of Art in Antiquity. a genius for plastic art carries with it something of the taste manifested on the grandest buildings and the statues of the gods and heroes. Just as the tiniest bit of a broken mirror will still reflect — ^in a fragmentary fashion, it is true — the images the glass, of which it is but a remnant, used to throw back in full, so the language of a personal ornament, a chair of Egyptian make, a bronze tazza, a piece of woven stuff from Chaldaea, or a Greek amphora, is just as distinct as that of the colossi of the Rames- seum, the friezes at Nimroud and Khorsabad, and those of Parthenon. To one able to read their writing, these small articles proclaim as loudly the way these several nations understood and rendered the beauty of the living form. The case was different in Persia. The artisans who clothed and decked the peasantry or the townsfolk, and furnished their houses, were not the pupils and humble followers of the architects and sculptors of the Great King. The Persians were not only masters of the whole of Anterior Asia, but of Egypt as well ; the industrial centres comprised within this vast territory furnished them with the best products, or those most in vogue, of their workshops. But whilst from the banks of the Indus to the borders of the Mediterranean the conquered nations everywhere worked for the Persians, they, in pretty much the same con- ditions as the Turks afterwards, turned all their energies to the defence, the administration, and the development of the resources of the vast empire. The genius of the people was adverse to that patient industry involved in the pursuit of crafts for which it entertained a certain contempt The art of Persia, then, was purely an official art, the property of a dynasty and the court ; but it was not a real national art Moreover, who will tell us whether either the anonymous master to whoni we tentatively attribute a great proportion of the sculpture at Persepolis, or the artists who succeeded him and completed the buildings he had commenced, or restored and copied them for later princes, were Persians by birth ? For my part, I very much doubt it The builders of the beautiful mosques at Broussa, and those of the first Osmanlis at Stamboul, were not Turcomans, but Greeks and Armenians. The companions in arms of Cyrus, Cambyses, and Darius were just as incapable of executing stupendous works like these as were those of Bajazet, Mahomet II., and Suleiman the Magnificent in the fifteenth and Digitized by Gopgle