Gothic Architecture and Persian Origins - Kaveh Farrokh

LETTERS
" GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE AND PERSIAN
ORIGINS "
SIR,-The thesis that Gothic architecture owes a
good deal to Persian sources is too complex to be
stated or tested by a composition of brief and scattered
quotations from various reports made by
various people even when such a statement is prepared
skilfully, conscientiously, and sympathetically
as by Mr. Briggs in his article on the subject in the
April BURLINGTON. Such preliminary discussions in
advance of a complete and systematic presentation
of the case may help to define the problem, state
the conditions that must govern a decision, and
above all to promote a fair and open-minded hearing
on which Mr. Briggs has so wisely insisted. Without
the latter, preliminary discussions may encour-
age prejudice, fall into sundry errors and retard a
final solution.
As a first requisite to any profitable discussion
of the particular question it is essential to keep in
mind that no adequate presentation of either the
facts or the arguments in support of the thesis has
yet been made. The exhibition of photographs at
the R.I.B.A., for reasons of space as well as cost,
showed scarcely a quarter of the photographs that
have already been made by the writer alone, and
even the total collection of photographs represents
only a portion of the possible material. That seven
monuments, all prior to I150, and not mentioned in
the literature, were discovered in November and
December of last year alone, is evidence that other
monuments of critical importance await discovery.
Only a few of the relevant documents have been
published; in fact the systematic search for them
has hardly begun, while important historical
inscriptions are even now in the course of study and
translation.
It was inevitable, then, that despite all his care
and consideration Mr. Briggs did not wholly escape
some of the difficulties inseparable from such a preliminary
discussion.
First as to the origin of the pointed arch. By
some inadvertence Mr. Briggs ascribed to me the
statement that its first apearance is to be found
in the Tari(kh) Khaneh of Damghan, a statement
that I have never made inasmuch as I am quite
familiar with the discussion about the pointed arches
at Qasr Ibn-Wardan (561-4), and have been careful
not to call the Damghan arches true pointed
arches. On the other hand, the date I proposed
for Tari(kh) Khaneh (circa 700) cannot be challenged
by quoting from Creswell to the effect that the
mosque of Nayin is the oldest standing Islamic
monument. What Creswell of necessity meant was
that Nayin was the oldest so far published at the time
of writing (I930). Godard and Creswell for that
matter both date Tari(kh) Khaneh as contemporary
with the palace and mosque of Ukhaidir 1 (circa 850)
because of the identity in the curvature of the
arches. Dr. Reuther of Dresden, however (and
there can be few better judges), thinks that a much
earlier date could be defended, and it is worth notinz
that the dimensions and the lay of the bricks
1 Cf. Gertrude L. Bell: " Ukhaidir."
are identical with those in the third-century 2
Sananian palace unearthed by Dr. Schmidt at
Damghan.
Although as a form and a symbol the pointed arch
came from India originally, there are good reasons
to think that it was first translated into an effective
structural form in Persia, despite the emphatic statement
to the contrary which Mr. Briggs quotes from
Creswell. The case cannot be easily proved one
way or the other since no standing monuments built
between the fourth and the eighth century have yet
been found in Persia. None the less we are not
without evidence of the early adoption of the pointed
arch in Persia. The bronze Sasanian salver in the
Kaiser Friedrich Museum contains an accurately
engraved elevation of a Sasanian garden palace,
the portal of which shows a sharply pointed arch.3
There is even better reason for thinking that the
pointed vault was first fully developed in Persia.
The earliest examples are not those of the Masjid-i
Jami in Isfahan, which belongs to the end of the
eleventh century, as Mr. Briggs apparently thinks,
but there are some others there for which a ninth
century dating can be argued. However, the
vaults of Nayin are certainly not later than the.
tenth century, and a local tradition which was based
on a now destroyed inscription insists that the
building was finished in the latter part of the ninth
century. Moreover, the pointed vaults adjoining
the Mihrab in the Masjid-i Jumeh of Shiraz are certainly
of the end of the ninth century, as are the very
similar Persian-built pointed vaults of the mosque
of Kilwa-Kisawami, off Zanzibar. These vaults, and
others which could be cited, antedate by far the
European examples which Mr. Briggs cites, if not
those cited by Rivoira. But in such matters
Rivoira is a weak reed. He wrote as an overheated
propagandist. Creswell has justly protested against
his intolerant, arrogant and provocative manner
and, what is more, has devastated some of his most
confident assertions of matter of fact by showing
that they were not facts at all.
The question of buttresses is more obscure and
is largely a matter of definition. Are the internal
buttresses of Sarvistan true buttresses and do they
contain the flying buttress in embryo ? Opinions
differ. A citation of the fully-developed buttresses
in the Masjid-i Jami in Isfahan, which lack but
little of the true flying buttress, would not prove anything
since, although a case can be made out for
dating them in the end of the eleventh century, a
fourteenth-century date is conceivable and has not
yet been definitely excluded.
Most important of all are the ribbed vaults.
While most of those in Isfahan belong to the decade
Io80-9o, those a Niyin and Shiraz are much earlier;
while in some the ribs are primarily decorative, in
others (Cf. Plate A) they are structural. Some are
all but identical with certain Lombard vaults, and
2 This is the dating given by Dr. Schmidt and Prof. Herzfeld
based upon some Parthian coins that were found on the site.
3 This drawing and its implications are being discussed in
some detail in a forthcoming article by the writer in the Art
Bulletin.
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