Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/71

 56 History of Art in Antiquity. greater than in Egypt or Greece. Moreover, the design is quite different It is not divided, as in the Egyptian entablature, into well-defined members of varying importance, such as architrave, torus, cavetto, and terminal fillet ; its parts having no marked difference, whether of size or salience (Fig. 9). The quaintness observable in these profiles admits of the simplest explanation, namely, a remembrance or imitation of original attics, which are nothing more than an assemblage of timbers. Deluded in our expectations of finding here an art borne of and developed on Egyptian models, the critic is led to seek elsewhere a conjectural derivation, with the only people who made as large a use of stone supports as Egypt, and the thought of Greece at once rises upper- most. As stated, the Persian column is more airy than the Grecian. To compare its shaft, therefore, with the Doric is out of the question, and we shall have advanced but a little way when we juxtapose it with that of the Ionic order. The column of the Erechtheium at Athens, one of the lightest classic art has fashioned, falls short of the sturdiest Persepolitan example by two diameters and a half, a difference more than sufficient to dwarf the Athenian support and imbue it with a thick-set stubby aspc^ct. Consideration of base and capital will lead to the same con- clusion. The Greeks were unacquainted with the bell-shaped base ; but we find another form of the Persian base, with torus and cubic plinth, in Etrurian and Roman architecture. The only capital Greece had on a rectangular plan was the Ionic, and it always ends in a square tablet, a detail conspicuously absent here. To find analogies thereto in Greece, we must descend to monuments elaborated after the conquest of Asia by Alexander. Such would be a portico at Delos, where, in his eagerness to {produce some- thing quite new, the artist freely borrowed from those Oriental m Fig. 12.— Hasc of pillar in one of ihc buiilling^ of Susa. DisULAVjv, VAft oiUifm, tooi. ii. Fig- 73- Digitized by Google