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.