Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/195

 ORNAMENT AND INDUSTRIAL ARTS. 179 ORNAMENT AND INDUSTRIAL ARTS. A country where, as in Phrygia, sculpture has had but a mediocre development is not likely to yield rich and varied stores in architectural ornament. Of its artistic productions only the merest wrecks have been preserved, so that the study of decorative composition is confined to sepulchral fa9ades. The framework and inner shapes of these are borrowed the first from timber con- structions ; the latter, by a long way the most advanced in style, from patterns worked in the loom or with the needle. The number of stone buildings would seem to be very small in the valley of the Sangarius. This is to be accounted for by the soft loose texture of the rock, a poor material to work upon at best, and the abundance of timber. As soon as the subterraneous abode ceased to satisfy the growing needs of the population, when some- thing more spacious, airy, light, and gay was required, oaks and pines furnished the elements out of which the house was made. The result of this is that here stone has not the forms belonging to it, as in Egypt for example, whether in the facades or the door- ways of mastabas, the sarcophagi and stelas of the older empire, 1 where the shapes are unmistakable imitations of carpentry work. It is a wholesale imitation, flagrant and servile ; not only traceable in the leading lines, but in the minutest details as well. The Phrygian fa9ade, without one exception, may be described as a rectangular space, comprised within a frankly accentuated frame, surmounted by a triangular pediment (Figs. 58, 59), in which all the essential parts of the front of a wooden house are reproduced. Thus, the false pilasters bounding the frontispiece right and left are copies of wooden posts, found at the angles of the square as main-stays to the building. The plain band upheld by the pilasters is the tie- beam of unsquared timber, deeply mortised at the sides to let in the pilasters and keep them in position. The elongated triangle crowning the frontispiece is the gable and framing which support the roof, of which every detail of the timber structure is literally rendered in the stone-work ; back-rafters and trusses meeting in the centre, where they form a double volute. The latter could easily be obtained from wood, either in the main end of the beam, when a deep salience of contour and corresponding channel were 1 Hist, of Art, torn. i. pp. 508-516.