Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/182

 i6o HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. Some, indeed, are quite rude, but in more than one example the head and the bust with its swelling breasts are treated with con- spicuous care. All modelling ends at the waist ; there are neither hips nor legs ; the body disappears, so to speak, in a kind of column enlarged at the base. It is easy to understand how such a form came into use. The flat statuettes described above required either to be hung or fastened against a wall, while these could stand on their own bases. In after years further progress was made and the plinth invented, so that a figure could stand upright without the sacrifice of its own lower limbs. But even after plinths had come into use for other things, these little figures must long have preserved the shape consecrated to them by tradition. The statuette reproduced in our Fig. 108 is quite skilful in technique ; the cylinder is hollow and thin in the walls while the whole is carefully coloured with the brush. In the design of eyes and mouth we may perceive traces of the influence of Greek archaism ; but the headdress, the jewels, and the costume have nothing Hellenic about them. Apparently the goddess here wears a wig. Our readers will remember that both in Egypt and Assyria such things were used in order to give a becoming frame to the heads of gods and kings. Here the black, artificial locks hang over the shoulders in broad masses, sym- metrically plaited. The ears are invisible ; as in many other Cypriot figures in stone and clay they are hidden under a very curious kind of ornament. In the statuette now being described, and in several other fragments which we have been enabled to examine very closely, the ornament in question is quite distinct from the hair ; the boundary between the two is accurately followed by the coat of paint in this case red paint with which the former is covered. The artist has been doing his best to reproduce a kind of conch shell, of gold, gilded bronze, or silver. On its convex face, bosses, like those raised by the hamther in repoussd work, may be distinguished. In one of the heads in the Louvre in which, thanks to the size of the figure, the nature of this ornament can be more clearly grasped, earrings are seen hanging through it. As for how it was fixed, it may have been held by a pin passed through the hair or even hung to that hole in the upper lobe of the ear which we find in so many Phoenician statuettes ! l However this may have been, the fashion was 1 See above, p. 69.