Events | Number 5, June 2004 | The Aesthetic Character

The Aesthetic Character

S Casson
from “A Survey of Persian Art”, edited by A U Pope
and P Ackerman

This article was reproduced in “A Survey of Persian Art” from where it is quoted below. Though written quite some time ago, it still sounds fresh and is still new in many aspects but not all. Early Persian architecture on the grand scale must inevitably be judged by the standard provided by the great capital at Persepolis. The tombs of the Persian kings, carved out of rock into the semblance of palace architecture, help us in many details to get a facade view of Persian buildings of this period, but the great accumulation of palaces, terraces, stairways, and royal domestic buildings at Persepolis provide the main corpus of information. From the ground plan as originally identified by Flandin and Coste, and recently increased in detail by the excavations carried out by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, it is possible to establish a reconstruction of the palaces in which no essential feature is missing.

The restorations of Perrot and Chipiez, made as long ago as 1890, can bear the scrutiny of comparison with the results of the most recent excavations with little loss. In the matter of color, Perrot and Chipiez had to rely on somewhat ambiguous documents like the description of the palace of Ahasuerus (Artaxerxes) at Shushan (Susa), in the Book of Esther, and a few material indications on the spot, so that much had to be supplied by imagination; but the discovery at Persepolis of glazed brickwork of the type already found at Susa suggests that the same coloring was employed throughout Achaemenid building.

Persepolis provides the standard for judging Achaemenid architecture, not merely because of its size and magnificence, but also because it is the best preserved of all Achaemenid remains. After the devastation of the city by Alexander the Great, the whole place fell into ruin and was not thereafter disturbed; but the damage caused by Alexander, as the excavators have found, was not so great as that which befell the palace at Susa at various subsequent dates, for this monument has virtually vanished.

Susa was destroyed by Alexander in 331 BC, but it was still further ruined by Shapur II, and rebuilt under the name of Iranshahr-Shapur. Rebuilding and reconstruction do more damage to a building than one violent catastrophe, and at Persepolis the very destruction wrought by Alexander covered up much of the palace in its own debris, thereby saving almost intact for posterity a good deal of the lower parts and enormous areas of sculpture.

At Pasargadae there are ruined buildings and great platforms which preceded Persepolis, and indications of Achaemenid buildings are found at Salmas, at Qazvin, and in the mountains between Isfahan and Khuzistan, while documents prove that there was a great Achaemenid building at Hamadan, the ancient Ecbatana. But until scientific excavations have been carried out in these places, we must resort to Persepolis for the bulk of our knowledge.

The similarities which can be established between the palaces at Persepolis and that at Susa, the foundation stone of which was placed by Darius, show that we must expect no very great variation at any of these other sites from the Achaemenid norm which we find at Persepolis. The chief differences will consist in material and technique. At Susa glazed brick seems to have been more largely used, while stone is principally employed at Persepolis, although at Persepolis, also, the walls were often of unfired brick and, like those at Susa, faced with polychrome figures and ornament. Susa perpetuated Mesopotamian traditions more tenaciously than the new capital at Persepolis.

Persian architecture seems to have changed hardly at all in general character from the time of Darius to that of Artaxerxes. In this respect (but in this respect only) it resembles Greek architecture, which established its architectural vocabulary by 600 BC and scarcely added to it again until the beginning of the fourth century. But Persian architecture was, on the whole, more static even than Greek. Greeks experimented with the Corinthian order in the third quarter of the fifth century BC and made big, if not aesthetically successful experiments of the Ionian order, like the Mausoleum of Halicarnassos, in the mid-fourth century. The Persians hardly experimented at all. But then Persians of the fifth and fourth centuries BC had organized and established a fixed form of civilization which satisfied their rulers as the final perfection of a virile Oriental mode of life. What Darius built at Persepolis, Xerxes and all subsequent monarchs accepted as the beginning of a great accumulation of buildings which were to have a continuous character and a more or less uniform style.

Consequently, experiments were neither attempted nor even taken into consideration, and the buildings and sculptures of Persepolis can barely be distinguished in date, one from another, by a stylistic specialist.
In this deliberate cultivation and continuance of the grand manner there is a quality of greatness rarely met. For it must be admitted that the buildings of the later Persian monarchs in no way fall short of the achievements of the founder of the capital. There is no apt parallel for this deliberate cultivation of a great tradition, even in the history of the architecture of Rome, that most conservative maker of buildings.

Had the Greeks of Byzantium not been perpetually spurred on to new invention and experiment, as was ever the way of Greeks, Hagia Sophia might have remained the standard for all future Byzantine building. Even so, the grand manner of Justinian checked all invention and aspiration for nearly four centuries, and it was not until the tenth century that Byzantines once more faced new and strange architectural problems.

From a distance across the plain the palaces at Persepolis must have looked insignificant; but they were not built to be seen from a distance. The basic architectural conception was primarily that of the rectangular solid. Yet in direct opposition to Greek buildings, there was no attempt to establish a fine relation between the rectangular areas and the various sides of the rectangles: there was no desire to make the height bear a deliberately harmonious relation to the width of the building.

The Persians were probably ignorant of geometric beauty and of the Golden Section. Nevertheless, they instinctively made no ugly combination in their solid arrangements of cubes and rectangles. The Fire Temple of Firuzabad (the so-called Temple of Zoroaster) shows that their sense of proportion never outraged the essentials of architecture.
The palaces themselves, however, were a paradox. Enormous massive pillars in immense numbers supported wooden roofs. A vast substructure tapered away to a thin, light covering. Here are both the weakness of Persian architecture and its glory. It was an attempt to create, not feats of engineering at which men should marvel, but a group of palaces on which the eye and not the mind should feast. And this strange method of building immense pillars to support wooden superstructures was governed by the inherent tradition in Persian culture of wooden buildings.

For the palaces of Persepolis are but versions, in the richest and rarest of materials, of what, in the ordinary way, would have been mere wooden kiosks, roofs of wood supported by carved and ornamented tree trunks, and lined within with tapestries, mosaic, inlay, and carpets. This was, and still is, the traditional Persian domestic architecture in those parts of the country where there is an abundance of timber. When Darius took over the government of his people he moved from the temporary dwelling places of early princes, of men who were semi-nomadic and unwilling to build in permanent materials, to a capital where the buildings to which he had been accustomed were to be reconstructed in the most precious materials that his empire could produce. This is the explanation of the gold and the ivory, the lapis lazuli and the serpentine, the haematite, cedar, copper, and bronze from which, as Darius proudly states, his palace was to be made.

The fluted columns of stone from Aphrodisias which the Ionians and the men of Sardes brought, were but another aspect of the search for precious material with which to adorn the royal buildings, a search which was the mainspring of the whole architectural feat. For the architectural purist, therefore, to complain that Darius was violating the best architectural principles by building stone columns where wood would have sufficed, and, worse still, making columns which were never intended to support even a fraction of the weight which their strength would have enabled them to carry, is to make a criticism that is beside the point. Where magnificence and display are the aim, where the aesthetic effect intended is optical rather than intellectual, pure architectonic considerations must go by the board.

It is, therefore, as superb spectacles of harmonious color and vast interior spaces, of priceless materials and of unstinted labor that we must regard the palaces of Persepolis. To give the onlooker the overwhelming effect of magnificence on the grand scale was probably the most deliberate ambition of the architects of these palaces, and they achieved a scale which far exceeds the Aristotelian concept of megaloprepeia. They aimed at striking the spectator dumb by a sudden vision of immense columns and vast staircases and terraces, which would so far exceed in size and splendor anything that he had seen, that he automatically felt himself an inferior, a tributary, a slave. In much the same way did Byzantium in later centuries impress the barbarian envoy from Russia or Bulgaria, the equally barbarian Crusader, and even the kings and princes of the Carolingian Empire. Sheer size has, after all, its political value with simple minds.

For the foreigner to approach the great royal area was a journey in which, slowly but steadily, his feeling of equality or superiority would dissolve into inferiority, unless, indeed, he were a Greek from mainland Greece, who by the sophistries of Greek thought could without difficulty fortify himself against such impressions. He would cherish the consciousness, which in foreign, and to him `barbarian’, lands never failed him, of his own spiritual superiority to all others, the feeling that he himself put into pure braggadocio in the words that rose spontaneously to tell him that he was a “man among non-men”.

It must not be forgotten that this great complex of buildings was definitely designed with the purpose of giving the Empire a living centre, a place where all administration could concentrate, where the elaborate system of information and advice could collect and be ordered by the royal secretariat. It was also the centre of all processional and ceremonial pomp and state. The relief sculptures of the balustrades and staircases alone gave a rhythm and processional quality to the whole building group. Slowly but certainly the visiting envoy would be led along passages and up staircases where every emblem indicated that he was the vassal, and the Great King the king of all other kings and princes.

But the great palaces of Persepolis and Susa must in one respect remain for the present a mystery: we have no sound knowledge, apart from the ruins at Pasargadae, of any buildings erected at an earlier date which lead up in gradual transition from the wooden dwellings that are the structural antecedent, to this elaborately evolved complex; none of the intermediate steps defining the evolution, in the manner of architecture, from one stage to another. Darius and his architects seem to have conceived their grandiose plan de novo, with little tradition from which to draw.

Two main ingredients, however, did contribute to the making of the whole. First, in the character of the architectural decoration it is at once evident that the architects levied on the cosmopolitan sources of inspiration which the great campaigns of Darius had laid open to constructive builders and decorators. The Persian conquest of Egypt in 525 BC had brought in a definite, but not overpowering, Egyptian influence in detail. Equally marked, in the second place, is the deep debt to Babylonia and Assyria. From Greece, the one unconquered enemy, little or nothing was taken, even though Ionian workmen helped largely to make the palaces.

The fluted columns display clear Egyptian influence in the floral decoration of their bases and capitals. But there the Egyptian influence ends. In shape they taper slightly towards the top, just as wooden columns would naturally taper according to the shape of the tree trunk. Thus has the Egyptian manner acclimatized itself to the traditional Persian form. The general character of the terraces and the raising above the ground level of the whole complex of buildings follow the most ancient traditions of the Mesopotamian plains, first exemplified in the great ziggurat of Ur. There seem, however, to be Iranian antecedents also for such massive platforms. The citadel of Astarabad had a not dissimilar substructure. The ramp entrances to the Persepolitan terrace, designed mainly for the exhibition of ceremonial entrances and exits to and from the royal buildings, find their ancient parallel also at Ur and in many Babylonian cities.

But in the column capitals themselves is an element which must be considered fundamentally Persian or Medic. There are five sizes of columns in the different buildings. The smallest is about a third the size of the largest, and yet the proportions and decoration of the capitals are identical in all, and the same design was used also at Susa. All alike have the twin bull’s head capital. For this there is no true parallel in architecture before the time of Darius, but the heraldic arrangement of addorsed bull protomes is used on an Elamite seal of the end of the fourth millennium, and had already appeared several centuries earlier at Uruk in a culture that bears marks of a mountain origin.

A continuous history of the motif cannot be traced, but it recurs at intervals, suggesting an uninterrupted existence in some region not yet investigated, possibly in the Kurdish mountains. Thus about 2500 BC a bull protome, immediately anticipatory of that used at Persepolis, is found in Elam, on the one hand, and in Anatolia on the other. Again, addorsed protomes are used on a Kassite boundary stone in the British Museum, dating from about 600 BC, and the motif is a feature of the bronze plaques and ornaments found in Luristan, many of which are of a ceremonial character. In the bull’s head capitals emerges the main ancestral contribution of Persian art to Achaemenid architecture, probably representing the influence of very ancient symbolism on architectural ornament, preserved and adapted on an impressive scale. The insistence on these capitals and their repetition in various scales when Egyptian motifs might well have been used, show that in them the Persian architects were emphasizing something which they considered to be characteristically Persian.

The lucid and simply designed plans and elevations of the Persepolitan palaces are also significant. Here were none of the obscurity and religious gloom of an Egyptian temple, but a straightforward statement in the simplest terms of architecture. And that the buildings should have been, in this respect, so un-Egyptian was all the stranger, since the palace of Darius and Xerxes was designed just at a moment when one might have expected the maximum Egyptian influence to be felt. The freedom from Egyptian convention of buildings built under the influence of varied peoples is the more remarkable when we consider how overwhelming that influence might have been.

Technically, too, the architecture of Persepolis was of the highest order. The same absolute clarity that one sees in Achaemenid sculpture, with its sharp outlines and swift cutting, was repeated in the columns and capitals of the palaces. The ramp staircases, of which two superb new examples have been found in the American excavations, exhibit a style of relief carving that, in its shallowness of relief and sharpness of outline, harmonizes perfectly with the general architectural conception of solid rectangles. These superbly carved and precise reliefs, with the continuous horizontal movement of the processions that they display, served, as it were, as the low relief designs on a gigantic casket. They were the panellings of a vast rectangular architectural background, and must have heightened with their fine coloring the effect of the bejewelled facades of the great halls and vestibules.

It seems probable that the Achaemenid conception of a series of halls covered with light roofs supported by stately columns set a fashion which greatly influenced Greek architecture of the fourth and later centuries. The Mausoleum of Halicarnassos repeats the conception popularized at Persepolis of solid four-square buildings. The colonnades of the Mausoleum suggest comparison with those of Persepolis, though the Greek architects inevitably made their columns function as columns and support appropriate weight. The Greek fashion of building stoai in their cities, to serve as resting places during the heat of the day, consisting solely of passages with light roofs sustained by columns, seems to have developed most strongly at Pergamum, which must have imbibed many influences from Persian sources. The stoa as such violated the ancient .principles of Greek architecture in that it was little more than a display of columns. And that was in origin a Persian idea.

In the history of Persian architecture Persepolis bequeathed as well as inherited ideas, for Persian Islamic architecture, even in Safavid times, contains many of the main elements of Persepolitan architecture. The wooden palaces, long vanished, that must have stood in the Median uplands, transmitted their influence to the stone builders of Darius, and the buildings of Darius, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes conveyed again to Moslems the main conceptions, which were once more repeated in their original material or in plaster and brick.
The dome, the arch, and the cupola added new and important elements which finally changed the nature of Persian architecture, but the general conception of form, area, and magnificence which Darius first laid down in his palace was to influence many hundreds of years of subsequent development.