Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/352

 324 HISTORY OF ART IN PHCENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. themselves to cover the sides of their amphorae, their cenochoes, their cups and aryballoi with figures engaged in actions whose meaning could be more or less clearly understood. We do not mean, however, to say that the Greeks of Cyprus anticipated those of Rhodes, Corinth or Athens in this path ; observed facts are inconsistent with any such idea. Cypriot craftsmen did not begin to paint pictures on their vases until that byway of art had commenced to flourish at many other points in the Hellenic world. The fact that in Cyprus vase-painting did not go through all the regular stages it did elsewhere is enough to prove that it did not originate in the island. Among the easily recognized productions of the Cypriot workshops, we find neither vases of the style known as Corinthian, nor those with black figures, nor those with red figures ; the very few specimens found in the island are visibly of foreign origin. The Greeks began very early to inscribe their vases with the names of the people figured on them, but no Cypriot vase has been found with any such inscription, either in Greek or Cypriot characters. The whole mythology of Greece and nearly all her poetry is illustrated on her vases. In Cypriot pottery there is nothing of the kind, although several purely Grecian myths, such as those relating to Heracles and Perseus, have been recognized in reliefs executed in the local stone. The general impression left by all these observations and comparisons is that Cypriot pottery underwent an arrest of development. It was born, perhaps, of a spontaneous effort made by a half savage population, whose ethnical character is at present unknown to us, but whose first lessons were learnt from the Phce- nicians. In time potters of Greek race were taught in the same school, and impelled, perhaps, by their .own special propensities at the same time as their energies had a new path pointed out to them by stray examples from Rhodes, they set to work to paint figures on their vases. The effort was not, however, sustained. It would seem that the attempt was finally renounced at the beginning of the fifth century, when the island was seized by the Persians and attached for two hundred years to an Asiatic empire. This sudden lassitude and even stagnation of intellect is to be traced in ceramics more than in any other branch of art. The sculptor was different from the simple potter. He worked for