Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/517

General Characteristics of Persian Art. 493 moral conquest ; without the former the latter would not have been. The great king Darius not only put down the Ionian revolt, but occupied Macedonia, and whilst his fleet sailed triumphantly all over the Mgean he was collecting a formidable host to despatch against Athens. Everything seemed to favour him in that long duel between Asia and Europe, of which Herodotus tries to explain the causes and the various phases in the opening chapter of his narrative. Sculpture betrays, perhaps more clearly than aught else, the real though small share of Grecian art in the development of that of Persia. We laid stress upon a distinguishing feature of the Persian bas-reliefs as against those at Nineveh, which they recall in many respects. The sculptor set himself the task of rendering the movement and the folds of the stuff in which he clothes his figures, and he has succeeded to a certain extent The first instance of the study of folds appears in the statues of Tello, the oldest in Chaldaea, but details are treated in a much more summary fashion than at Persepolis. It seems, however, that the sculptors of Mesopotamia had long forgotten even the tradition of what their predecessors had attempted in this path, when the palaces of the Sargons and Nebuchadnezzars were erected, which subsequently served as models to the successors of Cyrus. In the figures of Assyria the drapery is no longer allowed any play; the dress clings to the form. If the Persian sculptor freed himself from this conventional mode, whence did he derive his notion, except from the models offered by the statues carried away from Greece, and the examples he received from Hellenic artists who chiselled stone side by side with him in the royal yards? Telephanes, of whom Pliny writes that he had done much work for Darius and Xerxes, may have put his hand to some of the groups which embellished the doorways of the Hall of a Hundred Columns, or the substructures of the great hypostyle hall.* It was quite enough to ' With regard lo Telephanes, see note which M. Heuzey read at the Acade'mie des Inscriptions {RevM politique, Nov. 20, 1886). Pliny writes that he was not so well known as his contemporaries Polyclitus and Myron : " Quoniam se regum Xends atque Darii i^dnis dediderit* M. Heuzey sees in him one of those Greeks who, after the colli^pse of the Ionian revolt, preferred to enter the service of Persia, forcibly or otherwise, rather than leave the country. This took ]ilacc in the last years of the reign of Darius. Telephanes rose to a high situation in the next reign, when he b.*came the scalptor in chief of Xerxes, a fact which would explain why the name of the bttor shonld appear before that of Darius in the author cited by Pliny. Digitized by Google