Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/191

 SCULPTURE. 1 75 feeling which regulated the proportions of this huge sketch, which the sculptor, with rare boldness, flung high up on the rocky wall. 1 In point of interest, perhaps no manifestation of the plastic art of Phrygia can compete with the lion (Fig. 120), now reduced to a mere fragment, and which belongs to the tomb on whose exterior the two warriors are carved (Fig. 65). Measured from the nose to the back of the neck, this lion was 2 m. 30 c. ; that is to say, far beyond the Arslan Kaia exemplar, whose relief it also surpassed. The latter, about 15 c., was obtained by cutting round the outline parallel lines at right angles to the ground of the stone. High relief, however, was not used by the artist for modelling the flesh, the planes of the shoulder being alone marked ; the latter is more salient than the neck, to which it is not allied by a curve as in nature, but by clean cutting at the edge. The other details hair and folds of skin on the forehead, muscles of the shoulders are marked by sharp, rigid strokes, which recall the processes of engraving rather than those of sculpture. The mane, which contributes so much to invest the lion with his peculiar physiognomy, was well brought out by the artist in a series of tightly curled ringlets, carved in the plane of the bas-relief, very similar to those that surround the faces of archaic Greek statues. The work is continued in a different form on the vertical edge surrounding the slab. Here tufts of hair are indicated by oblique parallel lines incised on the slight ridge. But this very rudimentary mode was not confined to a portion of the work, where it must almost have been lost to view ; the same herring-bone pattern is found on the more apparent sections of the sculpture, from the ear along the cheek, where it perhaps marks the mane fringe, thence under the chin, the breast, the shoulder, where it corresponds to the wrinkle seen above the joint, the back of the quadruped, and finally on the fragment bearing the two paws, which, we think, belong to other two lions (Fig. 122). The slab was broken off just at the point where the fore-parts are joined on to the body ; but the head, the most carefully wrought portion of the animal, remains. Exception must be made for the ear, which is nothing but a triangular surface with a deep salience on the plane of the face. 1 Our illustration is from a sketch taken from below and too near the object. The result has been, M. Ramsay informs us, somewhat to alter the proportions of the lion, and make him look more lank than he is in reality.