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They had been strewn in the sand under the threshold of one of the doors. Terra-cotta cone. Height 6 inches. It was at Khorsabad, however, that the observations were made which have most clearly shown the importance attached to this ceremony of consecration.
The Sassanide monuments bear witness that many centuries after the destruction of Nineveh the custom of placing cylinders of terra-cotta in vaults was still practised. These same writers have ascertained that the architects of Chosroes and Noushirwan employed still another method of lighting the rooms over which they built their domes.
He was, indeed, to some extent struck by the appearance of Juliana, who, with her hair done up into what her mother called a "shin-on" a fashion much affected when she was a young woman and wearing a silk dress with flounces innumerable of the terra-cotta hue beloved, for some occult reason, of her kind, entered the room with an air of stately magnificence.
In the eyes of the French strangers it was all very marvellous the beautiful city with its stately palaces and hospitals, and the fair churches with their Gothic spires and pinnacles, their slender creamy shafts and deep red terra-cotta mouldings; the Milanese ladies with their jewelled robes and mantles embroidered with cunningly wrought devices, the flowering lilies and the garlands of laurel and myrtle all seen under the radiant sunshine and the deep blue of the Italian skies.
On the side remote from where he sat was a life-size bust of Christ in fifteenth-century Italian terra-cotta the face noble, dignified, strongly sympathetic once painted, but now worn to its natural tint, except where gleams of scarlet or azure showed in the folds of the vesture.
He appears also to have been a patron of literature and the arts. It was under his auspices that the collection of inscribed terra-cotta tablettes was made in the palace at Kouyundjik, of which so many fragments have now been recovered. He ordered the transcription of several ancient texts which had been first cut, many centuries before, at Ur of the Chaldees.
Everything there spoke of calm and silent night; everything there slumbered in rapturous quiescence, patient until the far-off awakening. What could be more touching than those terra-cotta tiles, those marble slabs, which bore not even a name nothing but the words In Pace at peace. Ah! to be at peace life's work at last accomplished; to sleep in peace, to hope in peace for the advent of heaven!
He had, perhaps, a tendency to the use of too heavy colour, especially in the flesh; and he himself seems aware of it, for, in middle life, for a brief time, he changed his tone to an almost silvery lightness, with very pale flesh-tints, as in the Uffizi "Holy Family," No. 1291, and again, after working at Orvieto, in the "Dead Christ supported by Angels," of S. Niccolò, Cortona, whose general colour is almost like honey; but he relapses always into his characteristic dark tones, especially in the works of his old age, which are for the most part heavy and rather harsh, with flesh-tints of the reddish-brown of terra-cotta.
They form, indeed, an important element in the pictorial effect, and enhance the terra-cotta work of the façade by the contrast of their colour.
The words ritratta dal naturale do not, I think, necessarily imply that it was modelled from the life. Owing to the circumstances under which Michelangelo's obsequies were prepared, there was not time to finish it in bronze of stone; it may therefore have been one of those Florentine terra-cotta effigies which artists elaborated from a cast taken after death.