Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/191

 FIGURES OF DIVINITIES. 169 lion, the formidable beast which the kings of Assyria took such pride in slaying. When called upon to figure a god or hero, he was often content to show him victorious over a lion ; sometimes he set him on a lion's back, at others he showed the animal writhing in agony under the terrible hug of his human conqueror. Such a symbol could be understood by all ; but it was no more than a symbol, a kind of hieroglyphic. When Greek art began to concern itself with the same motive it had a different ambition. It wished to make the vigour of the divine personality sensible to the eye. Chaldaean art had caught a glimpse of the right path when it set the frankly naked Hea- bani and Izdubar in a world of draped figures. But it was so accustomed to conceal all human shapes under a mass of drapery, that it could only render the nude very imperfectly, and, it would seem, on the small scale adapted for cylinders and other glyptic works. Egypt, too, had created the type of Bes, but had failed to adapt it to the conditions of sculpture in large ; the figures carried in such numbers to every port in the Levant were always small and light. The Greeks were the first to endow the type with the nobility required by a colossus or even by a life size statue. Hea-bani, Izdubar, Bes, the pygmy god, all give an impression of great physical strength, but of a strength incom- patible with those rhythmical movements by which general nobility and a happy proportion of parts are insured. With these latter qualities the Greek Herakleseven in his earlier days, the Herakles of Homer and Hesiod, was fully endowed. The nascent art of Cyprus turned, then, to the East for the features it required. It made its choice and made it with taste. Although there were lions neither in Greece nor Cyprus, the habit of associating the god of strength with the conquest of that animal was not allowed to die out ; it provided a symbol that none could mistake, so that it remained in use but only as a simple accessory. The lion himself was dispensed with and indicated only by his skin, which was sometimes knotted about the hips of his conqueror but more often thrown over his head and shoulders. Thenceforward arrangements which allowed but few changes of attitude disappeared ; the god was no longer perched on the back of the beast ; symmetrical combats from which all idea of a real struggle was absent were discarded, and the manly shape of the deity was required to express in itself, by the amplitude of its VOL. n. z