Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/249

 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CYPRIOT SCULPTURE. 225 two renderings of a single idea, but the connecting thread is never lost ; we can follow every transition. The emblems held by the draped Aphrodites of Greece, the movement by which they raise the skirts of their robes, we have found them all in the Cypriot and Phoenician statuettes of Astarte. And both in Asia and Cyprus, in the neighbourhood of those temples in which the same divinity was worshipped under different names, the manufacture of images in which her wide hips and dis- tended breasts were frankly displayed was never intermitted. Some Cypriot figures of this class are very ancient, while others date from no farther back than the fifth or fourth century. Pilgrims return- ing from the Paphian shrines sprinkled these figurines over all the shores of the Mediterranean. We have refused to accept the hypothesis which would make Praxiteles go to one of them for the motive of his famous statue, but perhaps the gradual dis- robing of Aphrodite which took place from the time of Pheidias onwards, first a shoulder, then the torso, and finally the whdle body, being uncovered, may have been suggested by these statuettes. They swarmed in Asia Minor and Cyprus, and some must have found their way to Attica. Did not the merchants of Tyre and Sidon have their temples at the Piraeus ? Rude and coarse as they were, these Asiatic idols offered a theme to the sculptor which he had not yet treated, and may well have roused in him the ambition to present the world with an Aphrodite distinct from those which had so far monopolized the sanctuaries. Whatever may be thought of this conjecture, it is certain that the Greek goddess of the fourth century was and remained iden- tical down to the day of her death with that venerable Nature- goddess whose first shrines were reared on the Euphrates thousands of years before. But as her years increased this im- mortal grew younger ; her flesh became, as it were, transfigured until it presented to human eyes the perfection of the female form : and her spirit was awakened at the same time ; it became alive to sentiments previously unknown, and these when rendered by an ambitious and skilful art, gave a new charm to her body the charm of expression. Between the oldest images of the Oriental goddess, some naively shameless in their nudity, others crushed under a heavy harness of robes and jewelry, and the masterpiece of Praxiteles, VOL. ii. o (*