Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/188

Vaultsd Structures. >77 Look as he will, whether internally or externally, at the aspect of the edifices that form the subject of our contention, Dieulafoy will never succeed in ferreting out more than one solitary instance that can be made to tell in favour of his theory, and thus add the matter of many centuries to their age ; namely, the adaptation of the Persepolitan rectangular frame to a bay full centred. The turning-point is to know if data warrant the assertion that the copy in question could only have occurred in the day of the Achsemenidae, when the art to which this characteristic device exclusively belongs was still active. The other hypothesis to which reference has already been made is that which would attribute the partial adaptation and imitation of the Persepolitan ornaments to the whim of a dilettante of archaism, his peculiar bias prompting him to take up a form that had long iallen into desuetude, but of which plenty of instances were extant in the tumble-down edifices around him, about which there still hovered something of die religious awe associated with the heroes of Iranian stock, the mighty sovereigns of olden times. Is not this explanation in accord with all that is known of the habits and leanings current during the second Persian empire ? Has not the Sassanid monarchy, both from the political and religious system it instituted, as well as the language spoken under its sway, all the characteristics of what historians call a restoration ? Is not this evinced in the way it set itself to link the present with the past, the chain of which had been broken by the Macedonians and the Parthians, when it aimed at nothing less than to efface and obliterate the effects of the long interregnum during which Persians had obeyed alien sovereigns ? Is it conceivable that the arts of design should alone have escaped the action of desires and ideas such as these ? Of course, all the power and cnrhusi.ism of tho new masters of Iran could not undo the work of the five hundred years that interposed between Darius Codomanus and Ardeshir, in the course of which the processes and the taste of architecture and sculpture had been greatly modified ; nor could their action reach the past when the traditions of the old Oriental art had been abandoned, extinguished by the fascinating examples, first of Greece and then of Rome. With the imposing- works (erected by the latter all over the extent of her vast empire, the architecture which uses the arch and vault had everywhere replaced that which N Digitizeu l> ^oogle