Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/108

The Column. 95 the ancientSi who thus connected them with one of the most charming points of human beauty which must ever be the noblest of all. Thanks to this wealth of devices, the architect was certainly able to pass from the tapering form of the shaft to the rectangular shape of the bull capital without offending our eye ; yet he was not happy in the choice of the prism adorned by volutes, whose great draw- back is the length allotted to it. This is no less thin one-third of the total height of the column, exclusive of the base and capital, and it betrays, moreover, embarrassment and hesitancy. The problem of how to effect the union of the forms is one that every nation who has made a large use of the column has had to solve, but none have gone to work in so laborious and roundabout a manner. The complex column, with double capital and volutes, rose between the four enormous pillars of the monumental Pn^yleea on the Per.'iepolitan platform ,* it upheld the ceiling of the central hall of the great Palace of Xerxes, and formed the supports, both internally and externally, in the main porch of the Hall of a Hundred Columns, as well as those of the hypostyle hall of Artaxerxes at Susa.^ But in the porticoes flanking the hall of the Palace of Xerxes on three of its faces, and in the smaller dwellings of a domestic character, they were content with the simpler bull capital ; the former, as richer hi detail and more effective, was reserved for those gorgeous edifices in which the monarch was wont to receive the homage of his great vassals, or give audience to foreign ambassadors. Though the colossal column occurred in one of these buildings, the complex type was confined to the main apartment, where on stated days the King of kings sat en- throned in great pomp, and where the pillar, owing to its size and ornamentation, stood out from the clusters of the lateral porticoes within which the multitude pressed to see the gorgeous display. Having described and analyzed the elements that make up the ' Until recently, only alight fragments of the capitals under notice had been recovered ; nevertheless the number seen bf Coste was sufficiently large to enable him to write as follows : — " The flutes of the shaft are cut to a fine edge, and the capitals, like those in the porch No. i, consist of four distinct sections." Scores of shafts and chips of capitals were disengaged some tea years ago. In Plates LXVII.-LXIX. of the adas published by the German Mission, entitled Details of Cdumns^ will be found fragments of the bull>group, along with pillars adorned by volutes and the cylindrical form which intervenes between these and the pillar. Altogether they furnish all the elements lequbite for a restoration of the column. Digitized by Google