Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/141

 FORMS. I 2 1 bell with a flat bottom and a decoration of sinuous vertical streaks. Upon this rests a thin abacus standing out far beyond the cap it covers. Another capital from the same place is rather less far removed from the Greek type we have mentioned. The calathos is ornamented with leafy branches, reminding us of the acanthus leaves on the same part of the Corinthian capital. A very thick abacus is decorated with three rows of chevrons, each row separated from those above and below it by fillets (Fig. 56). The worst fault of this design lies in its bad proportions, but, as a whole, it is more fantastic than the capitals with volutes, whose curves, suggested to the architect by the behaviour of copper or silver under the hammer, are never without a certain grace. FIG. 56. Cypriot capital. From Ceccaldi. 1 It must have been in capitals of this latter form that metal supports, or wooden columns overlaid with metal, terminated. In Phoenicia, as in Egypt and Chaldsea, these slender shafts must sometimes have been used, as, for instance, in the support of the salient parts of a building or of porticoes. The penthouse of the Amrit tabernacle seems to have been thus upheld by bronze columns of which traces have been found on the entablature. 2 Not that the latter requires any supports, but the probability of their having nevertheless existed is rendered very strong by the ar- rangements of the hypogeum near Cagliari, known as the Serpent The greatest width of the abacus is 1 Monuments antiques de Cypre. p. 44. inches. 2 RENAN, Mission, pp. 63, 64. VOL. I. R