Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/129

 CONDITIONS AND MATERIALS. 107 and these are found in the district in which the Phoenician influence was strongest, in Dali and its neighbourhood and in the necropolis of Amathus. Even when working for Semitic kings and for temples in which both rites and creeds had a strong Syrian tinge, artists were only too ready to make use of the inexhaustible store of themes placed before them by Greek poetry. Thanks to the predominance of the Grecian element, art ran no risk in Cyprus of ending in such plastic poverty as we saw, for instance, in the Carthaginian steles ; and the presence of a suitable stone favoured its development and gave it a remarkable fecundity. In chemical constituents this stone differed from the alabaster of Assyria, but, for the sculptor, it had the same virtues and defects ; it was easy and pleasant to work and its durability was small. There is not a marble quarry in Sicily ; so that works in that material are very rare in the island. Most of the few that have been encountered must be foreign ; they belong to the time when the originality of the Cypriot civilization began to fade away and neither in subject nor style do they embody the local traditions. 1 From the earliest times down to the last days of antiquity, the native sculptors hardly ever made use of anything but the friable rock which was everywhere within easy reach. This is a soft limestone, fine and homogeneous in grain ; it forms the substance of nearly all the mountains in the island. When first quarried it is nearly white, but after a long exposure to the air it takes on a yellowish-grey tone which is agreeable enough. It can be scratched with the nail, so that the chisel cuts it with much greater ease and rapidity than marble. But in plastic art as in letters, things easily produced do not last. The porous limestone is too soft to yield the effects which may be won from marble ; with it the fine polish which contrasts so well with the shadows hollowed by the chisel is not to be had. Any suggestion of the bony structure, of the muscles, of the veins beneath the skin, is impossible in such a stone, while breadth and vigour of handling are difficult to the last degree. Moreover it is so soft that subtle and delicate touches placed upon it are easily removed by the weather or by friction. Some figures disinterred by General di Cesnola at 1 M. REINACH, in his Catalogue du Musee imperial <F Antiqiiitls de Constantinople (8vo, 1882), mentions, as found in Cyprus, a marble head which has all the charac- ters of an archaic Greek head (No. 301). It must have been carved either in Greece or Asia Minor.