Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/188

 166 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. Thracian god ; in such an island there was no room for two of those nature divinities whose voluptuous rites had such an effect upon men's minds and senses. Putting Silenus aside, must we then identify this creature with Bes ? But Bes himself was only a lion-slayer by exception, and besides, sculpture in large never seems to have made use of him ; his grotesque features were better fitted for reproduction in small. And we may point out that although the personage here figured is formless and bestial enough, he is different from the obese, grimacing dwarf we often met with in Egypt and Syria (Vol. I. Fig. 21, and above, Fig. 18). In this figure the sculptor has been more in earnest ; his colossus is not entirely a caricature of humanity. The head and shoulders are much exaggerated, but beyond that there is no great departure from possibility. Strength in repose is the dominant note of the work. In spite of its grotesque clumsiness this group is of no little importance in the history of art. It is difficult to decide whether it represents some Oriental God or the son of Alcmena, the Herakles of the Greek poets. It is certain, however, that the idea of a deity at once terrible and beneficent, the destroyer of wild beasts and the protector of man, was not strange to the east. It found expression in Chaldaea, in those images of Izdubar and Hea-bani which were cut on so many cylinders and furnished so many suggestions to the sculptors and engravers of Phoenicia. 1 There we find the same nudity, the same muscular limbs, the same animal's ears on the head of a man, the thick mane-like hair, the wide beard falling over the chest ; Hea-bani and Izdubar, too, are lion-slayers. Such representations may have combined with the Egyptian Bes to suggest the rude hunter of the Phoenician scarabs (Figs. 28 and 29). They may have afforded a point of departure for the Cypriot sculptors. We shall see that Hellenic art took up the same motive and worked it out more simply and with a greater sense of beauty. We do not pretend to recognize this superiority in the colossus from Amathus, but even in these rude contours we see it foreshadowed. The Greek genius did not absolutely create its ideal of Herakles ; the elements were borrowed from previous embodi- ments of the same notion. Thus the Asiatic sculptor, when he wished to express irresistible strength, made great use of the 1 Art in Chaldcea and Assyria, Vol. II. Figs. 35, 142, 147.