Page:History of Art in Sardinia, Judæa, Syria and Asia Minor Vol 1.djvu/270

 244 A History of Art in Sardinia and Jud^a. their buildings by portraiture of gods and heroes, or of passing events, be it to record brilliant victories or the more pleasing arts of peace. Here the efforts of the ornamentist must have been taxed to the utmost to save his composition from poverty of aspect ; albeit in the time of David and Solomon a certain latitude had been allowed both in the inner precinct and in the holy of holies, whence from every convenient space looked out composite winged figures, resembling those common to Chaldaea and Egypt. Bulls, too, supported bronze vessels, on the faces of which lions were chiselled ; Iahve, however, was distinguished from among the gods of the neighbouring nations by refusing to assume any defined figure. Conditions such as these were not favourable to the fostering of sculpture ; hence only two statues of " kerubs," but those of colossal size, ten cubits in height, occupied the debir. 1 As no ancient portraiture of kerûbs has been preserved, it were idle to attempt a restoration of them. Nevertheless, the numerous references thereto by Jewish writers enable us to depict their general outline and divine their origin. The kerûb is a fanciful creation with the body of a quadruped and the wings of a bird — a kind of divine steed, who carries Iahve or draws His chariot through space with the swiftness of lightning ; it bears a strong resemblance to the man-headed bulls of Khorsabad, but is repre- sented by Ezekiel as having a lion as well as a human face, one on each side : " thus was he sculptured throughout the temple." 2 That the prophet did not faithfully reproduce the figures with which he was intimately acquainted in the first temple, may be accepted as highly probable, for lower down the number of heads under discussion is carried to four, a bull and an eagle being added thereto. 3 Such conceptions testify to the prophet's lack of know- ledge in plastic arts, which may be condoned in poetry, but which, sculptured, painted, or carved, would be intolerable. It may be safely concluded, therefore, that the kerûb in the first temple was single-headed, a mixture between the Assyrian bull and the Egyptian sphinx, heterogeneous figures fused into one, adopted nevertheless by popular fancy as types of divine attributes ; images which the hand of time dwarfed into the proportions of cherubims, 1 i Kings vi. 23-29; 2 C/iron. iii. 10-13. 2 Ezek. i. 14-22 ; Psa. xviii. 2. 8 Ut supra.