Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/103

 SUMMARY OF THE HISTORY OF PHCENICIAN SCULPTURE. 81 the same class have been found in Samos, and in Greece ; the ancient terra-cottas from Megara belong to the same family without being absolutely similar. A considerable number have been found in Sicily, chiefly among the tombs in the neighbourhood of Syracuse. Lastly, they have been encountered at Cumae, in Apulia, and even in the Etruscan sepulchres." l The problem thus set is one of the gravest and most complex with which the historian of art has to deal. M. Heuzey gives the following solution of it. " Those archaeologists who believe that the archaic style of Greece was taken directly from Phoenician workshops, could not fail to point in triumph to the facts just rehearsed. Not only do they contend that this wide diffusion of a single type was due to the spread of Phoenician navigation ; they say also that the presence in early Hellenic sculpture of characteristics peculiar to this series of terra-cotta figures, is proof of direct borrowing on the part of Hellenic artists from what they call the Phoenician type. Now before we can adopt their reasoning we must admit that Phoenician art had a third epoch, an epoch full of originality and creation ; that after having passed from mediocre imitations of the style of Egypt to equally poor ones of the style of Assyria, Phoenicia ended by creating a new and truly national style of her own. To me such an hypothesis seems quite inad- missible, and all the facts above recited point to an opposite conclusion. " Frankly, this last series of Phoenician statuettes seems to me to derive from archaic Greek art, from Greek art as it flourished in the colonies of Asia Minor in the sixth century, that is, from an art not yet free from oriental elements, but already master of its principles and betraying an original force which left no room for doubt as to its future. From this time onward the Phoenicians bowed before the new art, especially when the Persian conquest came to unite them to the Greeks of Asia as subjects of a single power. They imported the products of Greek industry, and imitated them in their own workshops. Thus in Syria was formed a Grseco-Phcenician style whose introduction to the country took place, in our opinion, long before Alexander's conquest of the East, a style whose traces are to be found in other things besides these terra cotta statuettes." The same idea and the same conjecture had already been 1 HEUZEY, Catalogue, p. 84. z Ibid.??. 84-85. VOL. II. M