Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/411

 JEWELRY. 373 can still be traced, represent thousands which never ceased for centuries to issue from Syrian workshops, and to spread themselves over the whole antique world, from Nineveh to the Caucasus, from Cyprus to Praeneste and Caere. On a future occasion we shall have to return to these cups, and inquire what influence they may have had on the Greeks and on the early development of their arts, an influence which was not even suspected fifty years ago, but now, perhaps, runs some chance of being exaggerated. At present we shall be content with drawing attention to the hints which may have been given by their central medallions to the artists to whom we owe the beautiful coinage of Greece. 1 Phoenicia had a good deal to do with the invention of money, and we shall presently see how ; but there is little enough in common between these well-formed platters and the shapelessness of those stamped ingots of gold and silver which formed the first coins. Once the idea was conceived, however, progress was rapid. The little piece of metal was rounded, spread out and decorated ; it was then that the medallist might turn to the Phoenician smith. The disk on which he worked was unlike that in the centre of a Phoenician platter only in size. The subjects that suited one suited the other, and in many cases we even find a type on a coin which has appeared before as one of these centres. We may give as examples the hero fighting with a lion, or some other beast or monster, the lion bringing down a bull, and the cow suckling her calf. If the archaeologist would follow up the inquiry at which we must here be content to hint, he would without doubt make more than one important discovery ; and indeed the whole question of the influence of Phoenician metal working upon the art of Greece has yet to be followed out and brought from a condition of conjecture and hypothesis to one of demonstration. 5- Jewelry. The boundary line between orfevrerie and jewelry is not always easy to trace. There are certain objects which partake almost equally of both characters, such as pectorals and diadems of beaten metal, of gold, silver, or bronze. We here figure a pectoral now in the Louvre, which consists of a very thin plate of beaten bronze 1 See M. CLERMONT-GANNEAU, L'finagerie Phtnicienne, p. xxxvi.