Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/285

 CHAPTER IV. PAINTING. WE have no reason to believe that Phoenicia made any attempt to paint the incidents of its daily life on the walls of tomb and temple, like the Egyptians, or to compile huge pictures with the help of enamelled bricks, like the Assyrians. But she must have had recourse to colour now and then, partly to disguise the rudeness of materials, partly to gain more rapid effects than were possible with the chisel. There is, indeed, no trace of polychromy in the older Phoenician tomb chambers, but we may ask whether such a decoration did not once exist before the damps of a climate far less dry than that of Egypt had effaced them. This conjecture is confirmed by the fact that around Sidon and upon several other points on the coast, hypogea of the Grseco-Roman epoch show decided vestiges of painted stucco. In most cases the subjects have been nothing more than leaves, flowers, and birds ; but in one tomb we find subjects taken from the fable of Psyche. 1 The occurrence of such paintings in none but tombs dating from the last years of antiquity may be accounted for by the simple fact that the latter have seen fewer winters. Many things combine to suggest that the Phoenicians loved to spread colour upon stone and clay. The anthropoid sarcophagi were painted ; signs of colour have been found both on those from Syria and upon specimens brought from other points of the Phoenician world. 2 It was the same with sepulchral steles. In some cases the image of the defunct and its accompanying epitaph are painted on the flat of a very hard stucco covering a part of the slab, and 1 REN AN, Mission de Phcnicie, pp. 209, 395-6, 66 1. 664. 2 See Vol. I. p. 184.