Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/203

 ORNAMENT AND INDUSTRIAL ARTS. 187 day adds to the evidence we already possessed, and tends to con- firm the hypothesis formulated by antiquarians, to the effect that the Ionian Greeks found the device in full swing among the dwellers of the tableland and the upper valley of the peninsula. This type they refined and perfected into the beautiful architectural member they were so fond of introducing in most of their edifices ; and though they did not actually invent it, they certainly gave it its graceful, charming curves, and deserve to have their name inseparably attached thereto. If in the course of our analytical retrospect we have not once made mention of vegetable ornament, that is because the Phrygian FlG. 128. Scroll on sepulchral fafade. After Blunt. craftsman rarely derived his decorative forms from the inex- haustible store furnished by the leafage, fruit, vegetables, and flowers of the woodlands amidst which he lived. In this depart- ment all we can mention are characterless leaves surrounding the basket-shaped capital (Fig. 97), the mediocre and rudely carved chaplets in the fa$ade of the tomb (Fig. 93), and finally the scroll, executed in good style, which forms a kind of frieze below the frontal in one of the principal monuments of the northern necro- polis (Fig. 128). Its arrangement is precisely similar to that of the scrolls formed by the lotus bud and flower, which Assyria seems to have borrowed from Egypt. 1 If the Assyrian artist improved upon his Egyptian model, in that the elements of the group, buds, flowers, and curved lines are better allied one to the other, so did the Phrygian outstrip him. Thus the leaf-stem is replaced 1 Hist, of Art, torn, ii p. 319, Fig. 134, 136.