Chapter VIII: Persia

Persia, and its Influence.--History.--Conquests.--Religious
Revolutions.--Zoroaster.--Mohammed.--Geographical
Position.--General View of Influences bearing upon
Art.--Decoration.--Flowers and Symbols.--Conventional
Styles.--Whence came the Monsters Appearing upon Wares.--Metallic
Lustre.

It is unfortunate, considering the great importance of Persia in the history of ceramic art, that it should have been a debatable ground to travellers and ceramists. Of the extended influence of Persia upon neighboring countries there can be no doubt. The Arabs acquired from that people much of the knowledge which they subsequently brought to Europe, and which will be treated of more fully as Saracenic and Mauresque. Persia gave a language to the Mussulmans of India, and supplied her with at least suggestions in the plastic art. Her art, in fact, spread far beyond the wide bounds of that empire, which extended from India on the east to the Mediterranean on the west, and from the Black Sea and Caucasian range on the north to the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea. To have an exact knowledge of the problems with which we have now to deal, the several great revolutions recorded in the history of Persia may be briefly summarized. These changes were both religious and political in character. Beginning with Cyrus the Great, we find the empire as above described, about the year B.C. 559, when Media became tributary to Persia, into which other kingdoms were afterward merged in quick succession. The empire lasted until B.C. 331, when Alexander the Great included Persia in his grand series of Asiatic conquests. On Alexander’s death, when the tributaries of Macedonia were divided, Seleucus Nicanor obtained Persia for his share; and the Grecian dynasty lasted until the Parthians revolted, and met with such success that a Parthian dynasty was founded which lasted for nearly five hundred years. This brings us down to the year 229 of our era, when Artaxerxes headed a revolt and laid the foundation of the second Persian empire. This is known as the Sassanian Dynasty, which held the sovereignty until the incursion of the Arabs, more than four hundred years later. Persian independence was reasserted after the lapse of a second period of four hundred years, and lasted until Genghis Khan and Tamerlane successively brought it under Mogul domination. The succeeding wars with Afghans, Turks, and Russians need not here be detailed.

The two great religious revolutions were occasioned by the adoption of the doctrines of Zoroaster and Mohammed. The first of these appears to have suddenly emerged from the comparative obscurity of the court of Bactria--a country situated upon the eastern confines of ancient Persia--and to have led the Persians to renounce their gross idolatry. The leading tenets of his creed were the existence of a supreme being, eternity, and the contending principles Ormuzd and Ahriman, good symbolized by light and evil by darkness. The never-ceasing contention between these two opposite principles is often represented by a bull and a lion in conflict. The cypress was Zoroaster’s emblem. This religion took a deep hold upon the Persians, and the first serious shock which it sustained was from the religion founded by Mohammed in the wilds of Arabia Petræa. Of the two Mussulman sects, Schiites and Sunnites, created by the dissensions following upon the Prophet’s death, as to the choice of a successor, the Persians preferred the former, and are believers in Ali. The Turks, on the other hand, are Sunnites, believers in the legitimate succession of Abubeker, Omar, and Osman. Propagandism by the help of the sword being the privilege and virtue of the believers in the Prophet, it is not astonishing that Turk and Persian should have met in the argument of battle.

Coming next to the geographical position of Persia, it intercepted, in its ancient extent, all communication between East and West. The vast extent of territory owning its sway, stretching nearly three thousand miles east and west, and two thousand miles north and south, must needs be traversed by travellers between Europe and the extreme East. Long before navigators had found the ocean highway round the Cape, Persia received all the traffic from India, China, and Japan passing through the Persian Gulf to Europe.

Let us now take in all that has here been stated, at one glance, and we shall see clearly why Persian ceramic art has been viewed with doubt. Overrun successively by Greeks, Parthians, Arabs, Moguls, and Turks; widening and contracting its boundaries as the tide of conquest ebbed and flowed; lending to India, and probably borrowing from it; taking part, at one time, in the Zoroastrian worship of fire, and, at another, in the Mohammedan praise of Allah; connected, through trade, with the far East on the one hand and with Europe on the other, Persia was pre-eminently a country to confuse the investigator by the mingled types, symbols, and ideas which it derived alike from conqueror and trader. One fact of peculiar interest remains to be added. When, in the middle of the thirteenth century, Hulaku Khan came to Persia, he brought among his Mogul followers a number of Chinese artisans. The Mogul territory touched the western boundaries of China, so that it is quite possible, that to the specimens of Chinese porcelain brought to Persia by sea may have been added a number of Chinese artists and potters arriving with the Moguls by land. In view of these facts it is not difficult to account for the prevalence in Persia of imitations of the Chinese, nor is it altogether incomprehensible that a question should have been raised whether what is called Persian porcelain is not in reality Chinese.

Persian decoration is rich in flowers (Fig. 140), for which that people entertained a liking amounting almost to a passion. The tulip meant love. Of the other symbolical forms found on pottery, the lion and bull and the cypress have already been explained. The sun was the Zoroastrian emblem of divinity, and the royal arms consisted of the lion couchant, with its head turned toward the rising sun.

The various styles of decoration may all be qualified by one word--conventional. Although on the earlier pieces the human figure is found, with the Mussulman sway it disappears, to make way for hybrid monsters resembling the half-human beings of mythology--compounds of women and birds, men with horns and tails, like the satyrs of Greece, and numberless other supernatural monsters illustrative of the artists’ compromise with the Mohammedan behest forbidding the representation of the human form or of living beings. Even the greatly loved flowers suffer in both tint and form from the artists of Persia. Colors were used in a precisely similar spirit. Nature was sought for suggestion, not for imitation. The question of color was decided solely with an eye to effect; and if a violet horse should harmonize with its surroundings better than a black, gray, sorrel, or bay, the fact that in nature no such color is found on horses was not held to be a legitimate objection to its use. In Persia, therefore, we are presented with a peculiar phase of art. Nature, being followed neither in form nor color, nor in the suggestive manner of the Japanese, which finds the highest art in the combination of resemblance and imagination, is relegated to the position of a promptress, and not of a guide. In richness and harmonious blending of arbitrary colors, the Persian artist realized his highest dream, and never forgot that, no matter what natural object might enter into his design, the ornamentation of pottery was surface decoration, and nothing more.

Before proceeding to the usual divisions hitherto observed, there is one point demanding special attention, viz., the Persian _reflet métallique_, or metallic lustre. The use of metallic-lustre pigments was, as has been already stated, known in the Balearic Islands, and gave the _original_ majolica its distinctive appearance. Long before that date the process was known to the Persians in connection with silicious glaze. The metallic lustre has also been found on Arabian specimens. It is in Persia, however, that we must, in all likelihood, look for its origin. The date of its invention cannot be fixed with even an approximation to precision. The probability is that it was never very extensively used, and the specimens obtained are mostly fragmentary. Many of these are from the ruins of Rhages, a city which stood about seventy miles south of the Caspian Sea. Earthquake and conquest successively laid this city in ruins, and each time that it was rebuilt its limits became more contracted. It was finally destroyed during the Mogul irruption under Hulaku Khan, in 1250, and it is from the ruins beyond the city of that era that the above mentioned fragments have been taken. In fixing the origin, therefore, of metallic lustre, the latest date would be six hundred and twenty-seven years ago, the most remote perhaps over two thousand. The metallic-lustre pigments were made use of as late as the time of Shah Abbas, who reigned from 1555 to 1628, and whom Jacquemart calls the “Louis XIV. of Iran.”

POTTERY.

Composition.--Caution in Looking at Specimens.--Wall-Tiles and
their Decoration.--Vases.

Chemical experiments have shown that in one kind of Persian paste there is a large preponderance of silex, that when fired for a certain time the result is a faience, and that a continued exposure to the kiln reduces it to a partially translucent body resembling porcelain. Some of the tiles show silica ranging about ninety per cent., and the remaining fraction consisting of alumina and iron, lime, magnesia, and potash. By comparison with the porcelain standard adopted in the table (Book I., Chapter iii.), it will be seen that this paste differs in the greater proportion of silica and in the presence of iron. It differs from earthen-ware, on the other hand, by its containing magnesia and potash. The faience of Persia must, therefore, be treated with extreme caution; and the authorities must be consulted with care, since what one calls pottery, another treats of as soft porcelain. Of that coming most nearly to what we understand by the word “faience”--that is, a perfectly opaque ware--some of the specimens are glazed, and others are covered with only a thin lustre or varnish. Very fine examples are found in the wall-tiles taken from the different mosques. The same style of ornament was applied to these and to vases, and its general character has already been designated. Arabesques and flowers--some imitations of the natural and others altogether conventional--are profusely spread upon both, with a boundless wealth of rich color. The forms assumed by the various vessels differ very widely from each other. Cups, open dishes with rims of varying breadth, and a number of water-vessels illustrate certain manners of the Persians. The color and ornamentation are distinctive. The favorite ground colors were the blues of copper and cobalt, and these alternate with red, and yellow tinged with red. The ornamentation is very often white. The Mosque of Sultaneah has already been described (see page 39). In others the colors are reversed, _i. e._, white is used for the ground and blue for the decoration. At times we see the Persian love of the chase triumphing over the Mohammedan prohibition of the employment of animal figures, by the introduction of hares or gazelles, generally upon grounds of light shades of green and blue. Some of the most remarkable plaques belong to the same period, and in both the earlier and later examples the coloring is exceedingly rich and effective. What the latter lose in simplicity they gain in brilliancy. Some pieces, apparently of great age, have a close resemblance to the céladon of China. The vases _a reflet métallique_ are either blue, or white with yellow ornamentation. The art of applying the lustre seems to have disappeared about the middle of the seventeenth century. The tiles of this kind date mostly from the time of the Mogul Dynasty. The larger plaques measure sometimes six feet by eight feet; the smaller tiles without inscriptions are star and cross shaped fitted together in a mosaic.

PORCELAIN.

Had Persia a True Porcelain?--Classification, and the Difficulties
Attending It.--Decoration.--Classes Formed by Prevailing Color.

Although the discussion was long maintained, whether or not Persia produced a true kaolinic porcelain, there seems to be no real ground for doubting that such was the case. That India produced porcelain we have already seen, and it becomes a question whether the art was not practised elsewhere in Central Asia. The evidence bearing upon the point clearly shows that Persia possessed the materials for making a pure kaolinic porcelain. The presence of Chinese works and styles does not affect the question. These may either have been the work of Persian artists imitating Chinese models, or of Chinese artists working in Persian material. The Persians call porcelain _tchini_, a name clearly indicating that in one of the above ways they were indebted to the Chinese.

By reason of the qualities of the paste already noted, the classification of Persian porcelain is a matter of some difficulty. The analysis which could alone decide the class to which the specimens belong is in a great measure wanting. It may be inferred that two pieces, apparently distinct in composition, may be really identical, and representative merely of the successive changes effected by firing upon the silicious paste. The most ancient kind is not older than the Mussulman incursion. When subjected to a great heat it melts like glass.

What is called “soft porcelain” is not, properly speaking, a distinct variety. It differs from the others in decoration, but not to any perceptible extent in composition. The paste is very translucent, and the glaze even. The external decoration is frequently blue or a tint of mixed brown and yellow, upon which appear flowers and arabesques (Fig. 143). Cups and basins are the shapes most frequently occurring, and the first decorative feature is that the outside and inside are seldom alike. The latter may be white, with copper-lust re decoration, and the outside may be in either of the two colors above mentioned. A style of decoration very widely followed consists of a series of holes cut in the paste round the rim of the basin or bowl, and filled in with the glaze. This method was adopted at a very early period, and reappears in the “grains of rice” work of China. A later specimen--probably not more than two hundred years old--of Persian “soft” porcelain has its upper and lower parts in blue and white, with lustred ornamentation.

Persian natural porcelain, about which writers have disputed, and called by the Persians _tchini_, is closely related to the Chinese. An entire class is characterized by its decoration of incised lines and blue painting under the glaze. The paste is somewhat coarse, and lacks cohesion. As to the antiquity of this quality, all that can be said is that it was produced a long time prior to the fifteenth century. Red and gold are seldom employed with blue, but rather characterize a distinct class. Green was much more indiscriminately employed, as, for example, with blue, brown, red, and gold. The céladons are to be distinguished from the Chinese, not by the color--for they show the beautiful old green of their Chinese counterparts--but by the design and form. All that remains to be added is, that, like every other people to whom the higher secrets of ceramic art were open, the Persians attached a very great value to the best works in both porcelain and pottery. The former is, in their literature, constantly associated with gold and other precious materials.