420 History of Art ix ANTigurry. any particular event (lurinpr that reign. He would have had to select out of too many exploits and too many brilliant victories. Moreover, the dimensions and mode of construction of the palace did not afford fields as vast as those where the Assyrian sculptor had chronicled, in long series of separate pictures, the victorious campaigns of his lord and master. Thus restricted in space, the Persian artist imagined a different scheme : he chalked out the plan of a vast composition that should be the glorification of a royal power whose titular representatives might change, but not the dignity itself, no matter in what hands it might be vested for the time being.' The idea, as already observed, was suggested to him by those stately pageants he beheld on festive days. It might be called a plastic poem, which divides itself into two chapters, we had almost said into two cantos. The first, or processional scenes, is only a kind of prelude, whilst the second is the main part of the work, and is entirely filled with the manifold aspects of the majesty of the monarch. In these pictures, in order to set a mark between him and his servile adoring subordinates, he is always made taller than all the surrounding figures. The preface might be lengthened out or abridged at will ; all it required was to increase or diminish the number, of tribute-bearers and guards. With the principal theme, how- ever, the decorator had recourse to another method. In order to adapt it to the exigencies of his canvas, he chose now scenes of a symbolic import, now scenes taken direct from nature ; the whole constituting a })lastic paan carved into a succession of images in honour of the sovereign. We find in the several palaces the same fundamental ideas, the same rhythm, the same division into stanzas, except that the text may be longer in the one and shorter in another. Yet it is not in the great hypostyle halls that we shall find it in its completeness, but in the much smaller Palace of Darius, perhaps the oldest on the platform. I-'or it was sketched the ordinance of the composition the inner sense of which we have defined. The arrangement so greatly approved itself to the Lord of Asia and the public generally that it was repeated in later edifices, the sculptor taking no further heed than to make it fit the particular plan of this or that palace
- I have omiued the enumeration of the several subjects that composed the
processional scenes, because they arc fully detailed above ; both in the palaces of Darius and Xerxes, the hypostyle hails, and the great staircase. — Trs. Digitized by Google
