Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/347

 CERAMICS IN CYPRUS. 319 seldom more than two colours employed, a dark brown between bistre and black and a dull red. On vessels from Ormidia alone do we find a bright red, and there its brillancy is enhanced by surrounding it with lines of black. 1 White is very rare. It is sometimes found on very elaborate vases, where it is used with the greatest discretion (Fig. 233). 2 Another striking feature is the multiplicity of forms, and their often fantastic character. In the collection exhibited in Paris in 1870 by Cesnola, M. Froehner, who compiled the catalogue, counted no less than two hundred and seventy-nine varieties. He adds these judicious remarks : 3 " The history of ancient ceramics offers this singularity, that in the beginnings of the art the forms were innumerable, and often of such a fantastic boldness of execution as to cause well founded astonishment ; in later years, and especially during the great period, their forms became more elegant, but their number was reduced to what was strictly necessary. As the decadence progressed, forms again began to increase in number and every individual fancy of the artist to express itself in clay." The development of the plastic arts is certainly one of evolution, of that survival of the fittest which, according to the ideas now most in favour, has peopled our planet with the organisms which now cover its surface. In its search after the best the mind of man begins with incoherent variety, with quite prodigious fertility. The first of the arts is speech. In early forms of language words overflow. To denote one thing the confused wealth of a primitive idiom has a multitude of synonyms, each connected with some particular property of the object, and according to the feeling of the moment the mind and the lips choose one or another. As time goes on most of these terms fall out of use ; when language becomes fixed by writing and by the habits of a civilized life, when it becomes what is called a literary language, it makes its choice ; it adopts the terms used by the most highly gifted of those who speak and write. It is the same with those arts in which the mind expresses 1 See the Gazette archeologique for 1883, plate xiv. 2 See plate i. of the Catalogue de la Collection Albert Barre. A cup is here reproduced in its actual colours, and the effect won by a discreet use of white is well shown. 3 Elsewhere the same scholar tells us, in the catalogue of a still richer collection, that he had noted five hundred varieties of Cypriot vases (FROEHNER, Collection JBarre, p. 2).