Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/314

 288 HISTORY OF ART IN PHCENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. 224). It will be noticed that the execution is very primitive. Round the eyes and on the feet the ornament is incised, not painted. Natural forms are imitated with much greater precision in the vessel reproduced in Fig. 225. This is shaped like a goat, and modelled with no slight certainty and skill. The hair and other details are incised with the point ; from the animal's chest a horizontal neck protrudes. Finally we may notice an example in which the handling is still freer, though rather more empty (Fig. 226). Here the workman seems to have had in his mind an animal with which he had never made acquaintance in life, but which he may have seen more or less inaccurately figured on certain oriental monuments ; l I mean the rhinoceros. FIG. 221. Bottle in the form of a gourd. Feuardent collection. These strange forms imply the existence of a certain activity of intellect and spirit of enterprise in their maker, but they are scarcely in perfect taste. The use of such vessels is too much obscured ; the eye cannot see at a glance, as it ought, the connection between their forms and their purposes. To be really fine, this latter condition must be fulfilled no less by the humblest vessel from the potter's wheel than by the most ambitious creation of the architect. A happier and more fertile idea was that which called in the human form. As with us, vases were commonly taller than their 1 See Art in Chaldaa and Assyria, Vol. II. Chapter II. 4.