Page 262 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

THE ART OF ANCIENT PERSIA
Achacmcnian, Sassanian, or Arab rule. They transmitted to Europe, in the twelfth
century A.n., a wealth of ancient Near Eastern themes which replaced the disembodied
animal style of the illuminations and enriched the capitals and archi volts of Romanesque
churches. This remarkable movement repeated, in a more complex manner, the enrich­
ment of Western art in the seventh century b.c., when influences from the Levant re­
placed the exhausted Geometric by the Orientalizing style of Greece. We cannot, in this
volume, attempt to deal with the later movement; but Achaemenian art was an im­
portant link in the chain of transmission, since in it, at the close of die period in which
the Near East had been the centre of highest culture, many traditions, both of Bar­
barians and of Greeks, assumed a new form.

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