Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/323

 CERAMICS IN CYPRUS. 295 web-footed birds play a great part in the ceramics of Cyprus, and we shall see them reappear in the early pottery of Greece. When the potter had exhausted the combinations of geometry, he must have called in these birds to help out his ideas because they were common in the island ; the country was not very densely peopled, so that in the marshes and on the sea-coast they had plenty of room in which to feed and bring up their young. They offered, too, a peculiar advantage to the potter ; he could make use of them without greatly changing his methods. His hand was accustomed to trace all kinds of curves and circles, and to suggest FIG. 229. Aryballos. Actual size. Piot Collection. the body of such a bird it was enough to draw a circle (Fig. 234), or an oval (Fig. 235), a few simple curves gave the neck and feet, and the pencil once started often prolonged the toes into thin wavy lines (Fig. 235) ; the wings, sometimes open (Fig. 233), sometimes folded (Figs. 234 and 235), were accentuated by differences of colour and by dark bounding lines. Sometimes, but more rarely, we encounter long-legged birds (Fig. 236). Now and then we catch the artist as it were between two stools, between the linear decora- tion he is abandoning and the figures he has not yet frankly adopted. On a small jug from Ormidia we see a vertical band of