Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/220

 196 HISTORY OF ART IN PIICENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. 7. Animals. In Cyprus as in Phoenicia, in representing human figures as well as divine types, we have always encountered an art preoccupied rather with imitation than creation, an art inspired first by Egypt and Assyria, and afterwards by Greece. Wherever the sculptor shows no signs of having been personally touched by the beauty of man or woman, we may be fairly sure that no great originality is to be found in his method of rendering animal forms. And this is the case with Cyprus. Many lions carved in the stone of the country have been found there as well as in Phoe- nicia, 1 but they are never anything more than either ornamental motives (Vol. I. Fig. 54.), or religious emblems (Fig. 94). Their makers had never seen the king of beasts in life, still less in freedom ; they copied his figure with a kind of lifeless indifference from types furnished by the sculpture of people who had studied the majestic brute from nature. The form they gave him was, therefore, quite conventional. To be convinced of this we have only to cast our eyes upon the fragments just referred to, and upon another which must belong to the crowning ornament of some funerary stele (Fig. 131). The execution of this last named figure is curiously heavy and awkward, but not more so than in the great majority of similar monuments. 2 A few are treated with more care and skill ; of these the most remarkable, perhaps, is the head of a lioness here reproduced (Fig. 132). It betrays, 1 The work now in course of publication, The Cesnola Collection rf Cypriot Antiquities, should contain a plate which eight heads and bodies of lions carved in stone are brought together (part L pi. Ixxxiv.). We have borrowed two of our illustrations from it. 2 The animals in a kind of pediment, on which two women are carved in relief between two lions, are no better ; this pediment was found at Athieno. The women have their bosoms bare, and carry their hands to their hair, which falls down upon their shoulders. Their attitude is that in which the Venus Anadyomene is often shown. At each angle of the pediment there is a much smaller figure, also semi- nude, but of such a character that neither the sex nor the original attitude can be determined with any certainty. As for the lions, their bodies are seen in profile, but their exaggerated faces and pendant tongues are turned to the spectator (see the plate accompanying an article by DR. BIRCH in the Transactions of t):e Society of Biblical Archaology, vol. iv. pp. 20-24). ^ e believe no explanation of this curious monument has ever yet been offered. Judging by its workmanship it is not very ancient.