Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/100

The Column. 87 ancient metropoles, if we disengage the capital from the adjuncts that sometimes serve to complicate it, if we discard varieties — of which there are but few — introduced for the sake of breaking monotony of aspect, what remains after elimination in all these exemplars, no nuitter their origin, is a group composed of the fore parts of two quadrupeds, their heads looking in different directions. The false architecture of the tombs shows that the transverse beams of the ceiling rested, now on the neck and head of the animals, now on the hollow between them. It is a conventional type that we have met in no antique edifice of the East, and if Greece offers one example, the " Bull Portico " at Delos, it belongs to a monument certainly not older than the fourth century. In Persia, on the contrary, the type we are considering appears as early as the end of the sixth century, e.g. in the reign of Darius Hystaspes, and from that day until the fall of the monarchy it is met with, from the mound at Susa to the Persepolitan platform, and everywhere on exactly the same pattern. Did the artists who made it the fashion, and by their clever handling secured for it so long an existence, invent it in a day, or was the primary idea suggested to them by some previous creation, which they took up and enlarged P To this question we delay giving an answer until after we shall have thoroughly described it; but without going farther in this study, we are able to say even now that the capital which appears at the top of the Persian column is, perhaps, of all the forms that are proper to Iran, that which best characterizes the architecture of the Achaemenid sovereigns. The shaft in all the orders of the edifices we are about to study is slender and slightly tapering towards the top. It is fluted in all instances, save in the facades of the necropoles at Perscpolls (Plate I.), and the single column that still remains of the Palace of Cyrus in the upland valley of the Polvar (Fig. 11). In the latter case the anomaly is to be explained by the fact that the building to which the support belonged, dates from a time when Persian art had not constituted itself, and was as yet gropinq^ to strike out a path of its own. On the contrary, the rock-cut tombs are coeval with the palaces of Darius and Xerxes, and if in them the shaft is plain it was because the vaults stood at a considerable height above ground. To have made them Huted, therefore, would have reduced still further the column, and divested it of o Ly Google