Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/224

 aoo HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. not yet been determined. As for the arms, although they were suppressed by Greek taste as not going well with the body of a bird, we shall find them reappear on monuments by no means ancient. Some sirens have a lyre in their hands. 1 Another factitious type to be found in Cyprus is that of the centaur, which occurs even among the rough statuettes, daubed over with red and black, from the Alambra graveyard. 2 The example here given was found there (Fig. 135.) This personage wears a cap of cloth or felt. His right hand is broken off, so that we cannot say what it may have held ; the left arm bears a slightly concave disk which can hardly be anything but a shield. The hind-legs are formless, but in the other pair, clumsy as they are, we can divine the sculptor's wish to reproduce human limbs ; the FIG. 135. Centaur. Terra-cotta. Height 4! inches. New York Museum. rudiments of a foot and knee can be readily distinguished. This centaur, therefore, is composed of the whole body of a man with the middle-piece and quarters of a horse added to it. There were no inscriptions on the tombs from which these monuments were taken, and history tells us nothing about the people by whom the cemetery was made ; so that we have no means of guessing the age of such terra-cottas but their treatment. This is very primitive. Phoenician influence is to be divined in it, but not that of Greece. So far as such a test allows of a definite 1 DECHARME, Mythologie de la Grhe antique, p. 318. 2 HEUZEY, Catalogue, p. 155. LUDLOW, Note on a terra-cotta figurine from Cyprus (Bulletin of the Archaologieal Institute of America, pp. 35-40).