Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/246

 222 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. would appear to confirm the notion of portraits ; but quite a different impression is made if we review a large number of these monuments, such^ series, for instance, as those possessed by the museums of Paris and New York. We then find that each variety is present in many examples which repeat each other like so many replicas, being distinguishable only by size and by shades of dif- ference so slight as to be almost imperceptible. The sculptor makes a difference between a youth, an old man, and a man of middle age. Moreover, the types chosen for these separate ages are modified by place and also by time, according to the dominant influence of the moment, whether that be Assyrian, Egyptian, or Greek. The heads carried out under one or another of these influences, and perhaps in one studio, form groups whose internal similarity is so great that if they were in clay instead of stone we might almost fancy they had all come from the same mould. The fact is that the Cypriot types never lost the general and abstract character found in every school in which the sculptor has been content to accept conventions created by others, rather than sit down before nature and question her simply and sincerely. Thus we find in one example the mild placidity of the Egyptian (Fig. 79), in another the hooked nose of the Shemite (Fig. 74), in others, again, the fine proportions and general nobility of the purest Greek type (Figs. 95, 96). We do not mean to say that the Cypriot artist was blind to the individual characteristics of the heads he had to copy. He was no realist, in the best sense of the word, as the Egyptian was before him and the Greek was to be afterwards ; preoccupied with models sent in from outside, he did not even succeed, like his Assyrian confrere, in clearly portraying his own national type ; and yet reality must have had its effect upon work continued through so many ages. In spite of the conventional forms arising from the successive and often simul- taneous imitation of foreign models, we may catch a glimpse of some of the features by which the very mixed population of the island was distinguished. Under all the reserves imposed upon the historian of an art in which a deliberate and painfully acquired mannerism plays so large a part, we may safely say that the race formed by so many crosses was not a fine one. The lines of the face often seem heavy and swollen. There is one broadly and carefully sculptured head which one may take, if not for a portrait, at least for a sufficiently faithful rendering of the commonest type