Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/100

80 HISTORY OF ART IN PHUINICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. with suggestions of a head and arms (Fig. 29), sometimes with lunar symbols (Fig. 30) added to it. The highest aim the artist can put before himself is to endow the divinity with features that shall correspond to an ideal con- ception of his majesty. Where no such effort is demanded of him he may acquire great skill of hand and eye, but he will never reach a hiorh decree of nobilitv and beautv. The relic from Go * / Malta, which we reproduce in Fig. 28, allows us to draw the horoscope of Phcenician sculpture. Two Greeks in a similar case would have commissioned an image of Hercules in marble or bronze, but these Phcenicians, who wished to do honour to their Fir.s. 29 and 30. From a Carthaginian votive stele. , were content with such a shaft as the first workman at hand could make. But although the worship of betylae was not likely to favour the progress of the plastic arts, we find in another part of the Phcenician character a propensity which must have had useful effects. Pupils as they were of Egypt, they never borrowed those composite deities of hers with the heads of hawks, ibises, cats, crocodiles, and hippopotamuses ; they only adopted such divine types as were taken from humanity. How this reserve is to be explained we cannot tell, but the fact is certain. Whenever the Phoenicians had to provide a head or a complete body for any one of their gods, they were as frankly anthropomorphic as the Greeks