Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/160

Decoration. 149 royal master. They are seen on the walls of the staircases and the visible parts of that which leans against the parapets. There the artist has written, if not the finest pages of his handiwork, certainly the longest. In the rock-cut tombs, sculpture is always found in the same situation — the face of the rock, which has been prepared to receive the image of the king at his religious func- tions, whilst below appears the pseudo-architecture in which we recognize the copy of the palace ia^ide (Plate I.). There is, then, nothing here to be compared with the countless multitudes that the Egyptian decorator scattered broadcast with astonishing lavishness over the surfaces of houses, temples, and tombs alike. The field where the Persian omamentist was called to exercise hb ingenuity gave him no chance of emulating his Assyrian eonfriret although even he was confined within much narrower limits than the Theban artist ; condemned, in fact, by the nature of the materials and the arrangement of the building to direct his inventive effort and intelligence to one small portion only of the elevation of the walls. Not to mention monuments such as Karnac and the tomb of Seti, by itself the Palace of Sargon could show more figures carved in stone than the eight or ten palaces grouped about the platform of Persepolis. Statuary played, therefore, its part in the symphony, but its note was grave and solemn, and would not have sufficed to assign to the construc- tion, as a whole, the character of noble magnificence such as the halls in which the king of kings received his court and the pre- cincts that sheltered his august head ought to pos<;css. Solicitous to carry out his programme, the architect called to his aid all the arts for which older civilizations had been famed. He turned to good account the natural colour of the brick; by using different kinds of clay and subjecting them to different degrees of heat, he obtained materials which, though very simple, when set up in place would form a kind of mosaic and thus introduce a little variety in the aspect of a plain and extensive wall (Plates VI I., IX.),' Elsewhere the master-mason overlaid his walls with a coat of coloured stucco,* more especially enamel, which the Chaldcxans had ' In moving about the rubbish that has accumulated around the Hall of a Hundred Columns, M. Dieulafoy came upon red and light grey bricks {L'Art anfi^ut, Hi. p. 11), a mode of colouring, as he justly observes, in common use in the edifices of Penia from the tenth century a.d. With regard to discoveries of the same nature made at Susa, see his Premier Rapport^ p, 63. ' Dieulafoy has collected, at various points of the tumulus at Susa, fiagments of Digitized by Google