Page:History of Art in Sardinia, Judæa, Syria and Asia Minor Vol 1.djvu/380

 350 A History of Art in Sardinia and Jud.ka. several centuries underground. Examination of the shapes and style of ornament confirmed the impression made by the material. The rudest Cypriote productions are veritable masterpieces when compared with these manikins, at once grotesque and preten- tious. There is a deep chasm between the art of early ceramists — no matter how quaint, rudimentary, careless, and childish — and the mechanical, arbitrary method displayed by an Arab trying his hand at superior, fantastic archaeology. No one, even with the most casual experience, could be deceived for a moment." Meanwhile M. Ganneau set inquiries on foot, and after much inquisitorial parley and timely backshish, elicited from some of the workmen who were not in the secret, that the figures were modelled for Shapira in one of the back streets of Jerusalem, by one Selim- el-Gari, a native painter known to the Europeans, having been employed to make a partial copy of the Mesa inscription. He watched the place, and at dusk he saw a man coming out of the shop, cautiously looking up and down the street to make sure that the coast was clear ; then going back, he emerged after a few minutes with a bundle carefully concealed under his cloak. He followed him, and, when he had turned the corner and was well out of sight of the shop, accosted him and learnt that he was always sent after dark with curious clay pieces to be baked at the kiln, and that he fetched them away in the same mysterious manner. The disclosure was not well received by learned authorities, whose unbelief was expressed with much warmth and indignation. One and all, however, had gradually to surrender to the " magic of facts." The collection was withdrawn from the Berlin Museum, and if one or two most compromised by the " Moabite pottery," as a natural consequence, clung with the tenacity of despair to their expressed opinion, any lingering hopes they might still harbour were rudely shaken by Shapira's fiasco in 1883, to sell to the British Museum a MS. of the Deuteronomy, written in old Hebrew characters on leather slips, supposed to have been found in a tomb along with a mummy, where it had lain for ages, until it had been found by its fortunate possessor. Again M. Ganneau, on bare inspection of the borders — all he was permitted to see — pronounced it at once a clever and audacious forgery. Its author, held up to universal scorn, was unable to bear the disgrace of