Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/348

 72O HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. vJ itself not by sound, but by visible and tangible form. They begin with excess, with an unlimited competition between one shape and another. In the potter's art to confine ourselves to the matter in hand the elements of such types as shall both answer their immediate purpose and satisfy the plastic instinct, are sought for far and wide ; hardly an object in nature but can give him some more or less happy combination. Sometimes he imitates fruits like the gourd, sometimes the body and features of man. We have seen the neck and mouth of a vase formed of a woman's head, while her breasts appear in slight salience on the body. But the effects to be gained by such an adaptation were limited enough, and the whole animal world was called in to afford greater variety. But in spite of the popularity such things enjoyed, they held a lower place than those abstract geometrical forms which resulted naturally from the use of the potter's wheel. Even among these, individual fancy held its own. Vessels were drawn out into narrow phials or swelled almost into globes ; some were shaped into large hollow rings, others were drawn here and there into the longer form of an egg ; here we find one body with two mouths, there one mouth with three or more bodies. Side by side with what we may call logical shapes, that is, shapes well fitted for the special service they had to fulfil, we find others which seem the result of pure caprice. As time went on and certain peoples arrived at purity of taste and at a really fine art, most of these forms were abandoned ; only those were retained which were at once elegant and thoroughly well combined in view of the service they had to render. Thus Greek art, in the course of its two or three greatest centuries, was content with a very restricted number of forms ; these it repeated without intermission, devoting all its energies to perfecting their decoration. It was only in later years, in Macedonian Greece, that the potter tormented himself to incessantly devise new shapes. Art is like the individual man ; as it grows old it returns to the weaknesses of its childhood. In most of its features, then, the pottery of Cyprus represents a primitive art. No doubt in some of its works we find things which establish a certain relation between its products and those of Greece, but such cases are few in number. Taking it as a whole, Cypriot pottery finds no stronger parallel in the ancient world than that of Thera, and especially of Hissarlik, in the