Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/337

 CERAMICS IN CYPRUS. 309 metrical decoration on the neck and a part of the body is no less complete and no less carefully composed than on the Curium vase (Fig. 238), while it has more freedom and variety. Motives are introduced which are absent from earlier examples of the style, such as the cable and the eight-leaved rosette. From this point of view, therefore, the vase is of very high interest, but its value is still more enhanced by the frieze encircling it at the handles, into which the artist has introduced a complex scene with several figures. Here we find the lotus stem used in various ways. It divides the groups, while the individuals of which they are com- posed grasp it in their hands. At first these and other decorative details prevent us from seeing the full significance of the picture. Its true theme is the homage rendered by two pairs of worshippers to one pair of divinities. The former have each a hand raised and extended in the gesture of adoration. As for the central figures, the deities, the thrones they occupy must be those bronze chairs incrusted with enamels and ivories, which were actually used by kings, and assigned in art to the gods. The attitudes of these two deities is surprising. They do not sit on their chairs ; they lie over them with pendent limbs as if they were drunk. The fact is, no doubt, that the artist's hand was unable to do justice to his thought. He meant to show his gods seated in dignity upon their thrones, but he did not quite understand how to bend their persons into the right curves, and so gave them the grotesque attitudes we see here. If we wish to realize his intention, we must imagine these two gods seated in the recesses of their sanctuary, and their worshippers advancing towards them with their backs to us. To show this on a frieze like that we are now discussing would have puzzled an artist far more advanced than the Cypriot potter. Rather than blame him for his inevitable shortcomings, we should, then, give him our best thanks for trying to escape from the monotony of geometrical forms, and for doing his best to figure a scene from contemporary life on the swelling sides of his vase. This same desire may be traced in many another Cypriot restored. Even in those parts there are several lacunae, but fortunately the most interesting detail of all, the wide frieze round the vase at its greatest diameter, is complete. In the neck there is more than one solution of continuity, but as the ornament is "purely geometrical, our draughtsman has been able to restore what is missing by the analogy of the rest, and that without fear of mistake.