Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/166

 144 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. but we can easily perceive that it is one and the same garment by which the whole body is embraced ; it becomes narrower from the hips downwards or is contracted by the plaits, so as to ensure its resting in contact with the limbs it covers. In the treatment both of head and drapery we find the impress of Greek archaism, and yet the work has one peculiarly Cypriot characteristic in the tapering shape which brings it almost to a point at the feet. From the reproductions we have submitted to our readers and the observations we have made upon them, it results that Cypriot sculpture preserved down to a very late date, down even to the time of Alexander's successors, a taste and a method of work which distinguished it from the contemporary schools of Ionia, of the Greek islands, and of Greece herself. In more than one votive figure found in Cyprus do we find a treatment of head and drapery suggestive of the Roman epoch combined with other qualities which show it to belong to the unbroken series of Cypriot sculpture. The number of statues that do not " smack of the soil " is very small. 1 The one here reproduced is quite an exception (Fig. 97). This Cypriot originality was more apparent than real, and was the outcome of those Asiatic habits and customs which have never quite disappeared from the island. Costume was there always full of variety, and variety in dress is Oriental rather than Greek. Caps of cloth or felt, tiaras, long clinging tunics and short tunics over them, bangles of gold or bronze upon the arms, wide necklaces spreading over the breasts both of men and women, girdles em- broidered with religious symbols and ornaments of every kind, all these make us think of Egypt, Assyria, and Phoenicia, rather than of Greece. Even when, by its victories over Persia and by the establishment- of the maritime empire of Athens, the Greek genius had won that ascendency on all the coasts of the East which pre- pared the way for the triumphant progress of Alexander, Cyprus remained for more than one century the heir and pupil of the old civilizations of Africa and Asia ; she was kept in that position by her habits of life, by the persistence of her ancient alphabet, by the existence of two races and two spoken languages within her 1 We may also mention, as executed in Cyprian limestone and yet entirely Greek in style, a fine Woman playing the tyre, described by STARK in the Archaologische Zeitung, 1871, pp. 67-76. Stark believes it to be a work of the time of Evagoras, modelled in the island by some sculptor formed in an Athenian studio.