Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/244

 22O HISTORY OF ART IN PHCENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. from Amathus ; the style of the figures is that of Greek archaism, but of an archaism already learned and skilful. The arrangement of the groups, and especially of the draperies, is a little too marked in its symmetry, but there is no lack of variety and grace in the movements and attitudes of the figures. This sarcophagus can hardly be older than the middle of the fifth century ; it may even be later, for it must have required some time for the progress accomplished by the schools of Athens and Argos to have penetrated to the distant provinces of the Greek world. The Greeks of Cyprus were never in advance of their compatriots ; they always lagged behind. 9. General Characteristics of Cypriot Sculpture. Cypriot sculpture lacks variety, but it is represented in our museums by hundreds and even thousands of objects. In order to study it in all its aspects, it has, therefore, been necessary to divide and subdivide our materials, a process which may have prevented the reader from grasping their characteristics as a whole. These we shall now proceed to point out. The school has nothing spontaneous or personal about it ; it is without invention or power. It begins with barbarous, even childish creations, in which, however, we can trace a desire to imitate the types created in the East. In later times the statue maker turned successively to the Assyrian, Egyptian, and Greek models ; he never managed to conquer his own liberty and inde- pendence ; he was content to imitate. Cypriot sculpture had, then, no style in the true sense of the word ; it gave no really individual rendering of the living form. But nevertheless it had habits and conventions of its own which give its creations enough family likeness to make them easy of recognition by a trained eye. This special physiognomy is due to several things to the almost exclusive use of the local lime- stone, to the combination of motives borrowed from various sources, to the singularities of costume and manners among the people for whom the Cypriot artists worked. The union of minuteness with want of firmness in the execution is to be ex- plained by the nature of the stone ; nearly every figure found in