Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/92

 70 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. 7. Summary of the History oj Phoenician Sculpture. We should have liked to bring a far greater number of Phoe- nician monuments together than we have been able to collect. The gaps in the series are many and wide, .but in spite of scanty materials we must do our best to define the character of Phoenician art, to estimate its value, and to point out the different phases through which it passed. The Phoenician artist laboured under an initial disadvantage through the very bad quality of the stone in which his first attempts were made. The coarse tufa of his country was not to be compared for a moment with the fine limestone of middle Egypt, or even with the yielding alabaster of Assyria, which so tempted the sculptor's chisel by its docility, still less could it be compared to the splendid marbles cut by the Greeks from the inexhaustible quarries of Paros and Pentelicus. Another condition of inferiority is to be found in the supercession of the Egyptian schenti by the long robe. Familiarity with the nude is the first necessity for great sculpture; the interest it awakens, the ambition it stimulates, the necessity it imposes for studying the ruling lines and movements of the most perfect and complex of living things, are the foundations of all plastic perfection. One or two schools of sculpture may, no doubt, be quoted which made singularly happy use of the draped figure and especially of the human countenance, without having gone through this experi- ence ; such a school was that of Tuscany in the early renaissance, but such a school was not that of Phoenicia. The Phoenician artist never looked at nature closely enough to discover the in- dividual. Egypt excelled in portraiture, but not only has Phoenicia left us nothing we can call a portrait, she did not always succeed even in clearly marking the race characteristics. Egypt has pictured for us not only the distinctive features of her own people but also the hereditary types of all the nations by whom she was surrounded ; the Assyrian sculptors did not aim so high, but at least they succeeded in fixing the national traits of their own people. The Phoenicians made no such attempt ; we may search in vain among the bas-reliefs, the statues, the terra-cottas, the engraved stones, which make up their plastic legacy ; we shall not succeed