There is clearly a paradox at work here: how can sounds that are unheard, that are silent, be more pleasing to the ear than those that can be heard? In invoking this tension between the sounds of music and its corresponding visual representation, Keats points to the role of the imagination in the aesthetic experience of ancient Greek vase-painting. Images of musical performances are sweeter precisely because they cannot be heard. The audience must instead imagine the sounds, creating an infinite variety of melodic possibilities that emanate from the image. Permanently captured in a state of continued poetic performance, the pipes play on, repeatedly offering to the viewer the opportunity to imagine the acoustic sounds that fill the visual scene.

Chapter one argues for the significance of visualized divine music by situating ancient viewers’ experience of representations of divine music within their ancient contexts, thereby establishing a well-defined space in which divine music could have been seen, imaginatively heard, and experienced. Laferrière takes as her focus a corpus of fourth-century BCE votive reliefs that depict Pan playing his syrinx and the Nymphs dancing; dedicated to these same gods, the reliefs were consistently deposited in cave shrines throughout Attica. Since the clear archaeological record allows for a reconstruction of the worshipper’s religious experience, Laferrière draws attention to the ways the reliefs provoked specific sensory experiences in the ancient worshippers. Within the cave shrines, worshippers could have gazed upon votive reliefs that were visually similar to the physical cave, so that the distinction between image and reality blurred and collapsed. As a result, these reliefs allowed for a fully embodied experience of the Nymphs: by imaginatively listening to the music that Pan plays, and perhaps even contributing their own music, worshippers are invited to join in the Nymphs’ dance.

Chapter three turns to scenes of Apollo Kitharoidos, the god most associated in contemporary scholarship with musical performance. In order to analyze how the surviving representations make visible Apollo’s music to the ancient viewer and how the god’s music is shown to have an effect on both his human and divine audience, Laferrière examines black- and red-figure vase-paintings that depict the god playing his lyre. Apollo’s powerfully affective music informs the scene’s composition, whether it is through the physical position of the figures, who direct their attention to the god’s music, or through the repetition of similar lines and forms among Apollo, his instrument, his audience, and the plants and animals that accompany him. She argues that the formal aspects of the composition can be discussed in terms of rhythmoi, symmetria, and harmonia, which are all integral concepts within ancient discussions of music and art theory. In making the sounds of Apollo’s music visible in this way, Laferrière shows that Apollo’s music has a unifying and harmonizing effect on those who listen to it, so that the music he plays both embodies and creates the harmonia with which he is associated.

Chapter two explores how we might develop a vocabulary for describing the appearance and effect of visual music by examining red-figure vases that depict Apollo simultaneously playing his lyre and pouring a libation. This synchronicity between the god’s two actions, one musical and the other ritual, demonstrates that his movements are rhythmic in a similar way to, or are even conditioned by, the sounds of his music, so that the images draw an implicit connection between divine music, rhythm, and ritual. Laferrière argues that the slow music that Apollo creates with one hand establishes a visual rhythm and musical pattern that are derived from the god’s body as well as the forms of the musical and ritual objects that he holds. For the ancient viewer, each image acts as an invitation to engage with its visualized musical rhythm, to hear imaginatively the sounds of the god’s music. In this interplay between visual image and imagined sound, and in one’s own participation in animating the god’s ritual, the viewer could experience the presence of Apollo in a moment of coordinated musical rhythm and harmony.

Chapter five focuses upon scenes of revels in which Dionysos is surrounded by the musical and danced performances of satyrs and maenads, the mythical beings who accompany him. Dionysos exhibits a distinct kind of musicality: unlike the other gods, Dionysos rarely plays an instrument himself. Rather, he acts as the source of inspiration for satyrs and maenads, prompting them to play their instruments, dance to the wild music they produce, and lose themselves, collectively, to the ecstatic sounds that envelop them. The movements of the satyrs and maenads also communicate to the external viewers how they might experience Dionysos’ presence. Within the symposium, ancient viewers created the opportunity for Dionysos to manifest when they consumed wine from the vases, looked at the representations of mythical revels, listened to music performed on similar instruments, and moved their bodies in response to the music they both saw and heard. Such immersive and imaginative seeing and hearing thus allowed the symposiasts to join in the divine revel, where, under the influence of Dionysos, they played instruments and danced with satyrs and maenads.

The introduction establishes the characteristics of divine music. Noting the discrepancies between the visual and literary accounts of the gods and the variability in the instruments with which they choose to perform, Laferrière argues that the gods’ active use of their instruments lends a sonic quality to their representation. In demarcating divine music-making as distinct from human musical practices, she shows that these images require a correspondingly distinct mode of interpretation and analysis, since the scenes feature musical performances that are undertaken outside the human world.

It is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture when one is focusing only on tiny residues of past polychromies on stone monuments. Throughout this book, I have tried to offer a set of methodological approaches and scenarios that I think offer fruitful avenues to think about and study the polychrome past of the Achaemenid Persian Empire and the sites of Persepolis and Susa in modern Iran in particular. In this final chapter, I would like to contextualize modern research on pigments, paint, and color in Achaemenid Persian art again, this time in the context of more recent imperial polychromies, later interpretations, ethical approaches, and in the global world of responsible stewardship.

With the twentieth century came a new series of more extensive interventions on the site of Persepolis that were accompanied by more or less increased systematic documentation. While pillaging of the monuments on the site was widespread, especially during the late 1920s, scientifically documented fieldwork on the Takht was now conducted by an American team under the aegis of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Ernst Herzfeld (1879–1948) directed the field operations between 1931 and 1934.1 He was replaced by Erich Schmidt (1897–1964) who continued through 1939.2 The objective of the excavations by Schmidt “was to clear the ruined palaces of its debris, … to preserve the remains, [and] … to establish a pottery sequence for the MarvDasht region.”3 In subsequent years, important fieldwork was conducted by Iranian teams, led by Ali Sami (1910–89) between 1939 and 1959,4 Akbar Tajvidi (1926–2017) between 1969 and 19725 and Shahpur A. Shahbazi (1942–2006) in 1975.6 Between 1965 and 1978, the Iranian efforts were accompanied by an Italian restoration team sponsored by the Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente in Rome. This team was then led by Giuseppe Tilia (1931–2001) and Ann Britt Peterson Tilia (1926–88).7

In the preceding chapters, the focus has been on documenting traces of polychromy and on related matters of historiography, archaeology, and conservation. This chapter is an attempt to explain why knowledge of polychromy in the Achaemenid Persian Empire matters when studying Achaemenid Persian history. This chapter will show that systematic strategies for studying and analyzing pigments and polychromy in Persepolis and other heartland Achaemenid sites are not merely ends in themselves. Although important, they are not merely strategies of data development relevant to documentation in the practice of field archaeology and site conservation. The study of polychromy has the potential to greatly enhance our appreciation of the meanings of the Achaemenid visual vocabulary and culture. And because the Achaemenid Persian Empire was so vast and so interconnected with the cultures within and contiguous to it, analyses of Achaemenid polychromy are critical ultimately to our growing understanding of polychromy throughout the greater Mediterranean region. According to Diana Young, colors “animate things in a variety of ways, evoking space, emitting brilliance, endow[ing] things with an aura of energy and light.”1 Polychromy is, therefore, a key feature in concepts supporting an anthropology of luminosity, since the very material components of color are elements of the light source itself, while it is part of the Mineral Universe these palatial sites represented.2

In this chapter I lay out a theoretical framework by providing a definition of polychromy as used in this book. I review the development of polychromy studies and deal specifically with the early stages of the modern reception of ancient western Asian polychromies. I investigate and explore how the surface of ancient stone monuments, particularly of Assyria, has been encountered by antiquarians, archaeologists, and museum curators and how the polychromies have inspired, been displayed, and appreciated since the nineteenth century. This is not an exhaustive survey. Within this framework, however, issues of competing definitions, aesthetic debates and movements, as well as aspects of influence from polychromy debates in relation to other ancient civilizations such as Egypt, Greece, and Rome, loom large. At the more recent end of this engagement stands Batchelor’s (2000) Chromophobia. Batchelor argued that nineteenth-century European thought laid much of the ground for a fear that color would eventually “take over” the values of western civilization. He suggested that it was in the nineteenth century that color became “forcefully” excluded and abolished from a presumed universal western mindset, because it was seen as a “corruption of culture” implicitly tied to “the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile …”1 It is mainly for this reason that for many decades, scholars trained in a European-American tradition, and increasingly scholars trained around the world, have conceptualized and presented the past as predominantly “white.”

Documentation of evidence for polychromy on the limestone façades and monuments of Persepolis, Naqsh-e Rustam, and Susa extends back over two centuries. This effort has been intensified in the last several decades, as we have seen in previous chapters. In all that time many approaches to the recording, preserving, and analyzing of traces of paint have come and gone. Today there are advanced nondestructive techniques for discerning elusive traces of pigment. The most effective of these are more viable in a museum conservation laboratory on isolated monuments or fragments than they can possibly be at vast open-air sites. Thus, for instance, it was possible to use a portable XR-fluorescence spectrometer (XRF) when examining a number of Achaemenid Persian relief sculptures housed in the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin.1 I was able to employ a digital microscope (Keyence) on outdoor monuments in Persepolis and when studying collections in the museums of Persepolis, Tehran, and Washington, DC, together with stone conservation specialists.2

Behind glass doors in a repository in the basement of the National Museum of Asian Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, remain a modest number of beautiful pigments from almost 2,500-year-old stone façades on the sites of Persepolis, Naqsh-e Rustam, and Pasargadae in Iran (Figures I.1–I.3). Away from the ruins of the monuments standing calm and in gentle dignity in Fars in southern Iran, these tiny pigments, stuck on paper squeezes made on the sites only two generations ago provide an amazing opportunity to approach and better understand the aesthetics and sensual visual culture of the great palaces and environs of Achaemenid Persia. Even more, the residues are a window into the world of the craftsmen and people who built Persepolis and other sites. They are part of the great narrative connecting painters, people, places, and traditions across cultures and times, connecting the largest world empire between the late sixth and mid fourth centuries bce and beyond with today. They are at the heart of this book.

What happened during all these decades on the sites of Persepolis and Susa in Fars and Khuzestan, and their larger imperial context? Very much like their neighbors in Mesopotamia, they have much to offer in a fresh perspective on the recovery of polychromy and on the competing factors and tensions between presentation and preservation since the nineteenth century. The objective of the next chapters is to offer an historical, historiographical, and largely documentary overview of evidence for polychromies at the imperial centers of the Achaemenid Persian world within the context of debates around ancient polychromies as introduced in Chapter 1. I will present relevant information from ancient sources and then proceed first to the testimony of early modern travelers. This survey will be followed by an introduction of nineteenth-century antiquarians’ and excavators’ comments on the original polychromy. The documentary evidence collected here is critical to a fuller appreciation of the original reemerging polychromies of the Achaemenid Persian palatial environment. It also provides additional thoughts and reveals the significance of perceptions (1) of the polychromy of ancient palace architecture in general, and (2) of the polychromy of ancient Persia within the larger general discourse on the historiography of the archaeology of Achaemenid imperial sites. Heretofore, with few exceptions the importance of polychromy in that discourse has remained largely hidden.