Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/434

 394 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. taste, and they did so ; but they pushed the art far beyond the point at which it had been left by their masters. The stimulus to all this was no doubt the desire to produce a class of jewelry which should look as well as these massive trinkets, and yet, by the comparatively small quantity of metal required, should afford a good profit to its producers. At any rate both gold and silver were used more sparingly by the Phoenician jeweller than by his predecessors on the south and east. He was the first to make delicate networks and cables of gold, and to decorate surfaces with the finest threads of metal bent into varied shapes. When a flower or the head of an animal had to be modelled, he thoroughly understood how to complete the work of the chisel with the burin. In a word, no resource of the art was strange to him. The only advance the Greeks could make upon his work was the introduction of human forms into their jewels and FIG. 334. Wild goat. Gold. British Museum. gems ; this advance, indeed, they made good with all the skill and taste they showed in other things. In Phoenician work geometrical and vegetable forms prevail ; a few types from the lower animals are managed with breadth and with a fine eye for decorative effect. But man is almost entirely absent ; at most he is represented by a few male and female heads in quite subordinate positions. Hardly a statuette of any importance can be mentioned but that bust of Isis which seems to have no slight vogue in the eastern workshops (Fig- 3'3). And there is nothing in the mere absence of the human figure from Phoenician jewelry to condemn it to inferiority. The object of jewelry is to enhance the effect of the single man or woman by whom it is carried, to make him or her more beautiful and imposing ; so that we might fairly say that the jeweller who