Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/121

GENERAL REMARKS UPON THE STUDY OF PHOENICIAN ART. 101 hard to define ; it is difficult to fix upon a date at which our labours should close. Egyptian art always remained faithful to itself and to its principle. Down to the appearance of the Ptolemies every change was made on the sole basis of its own past ; it had never come under foreign influence. Of the art of Chaldaeo- Assyria we may say the same. It had produced all the works we have described 1 before the development of the Greek genius had gone far enough to penetrate those distant countries and to impose its own models upon their inhabitants. With Phoenicia, and still more with Cyprus, it was otherwise. The plastic genius of their inhabitants was not very pronounced, and the example of Greece began to have its effect upon them at a very early hour. As they had imitated Egypt, Chaldsea, and Assyria in their order, so they began to imitate Greece as soon as the latter had created her architectural orders and had learnt to give the human form a truth and nobility unknown before her time. And as generation followed generation, and the art of the Greeks mounted higher and higher, the influence they exercised over the whole Mediterranean basin, with the one exception of Egypt, became more and more decisive. After a certain date Cyprus and Phoenicia hardly fashioned an object in which a knowledge of Hellenic types is not betrayed in some detail of form or ornament. It may be thought that such objects should be left for discussion when we come to treat of the art of Greece, or should be disregarded altogether. But the remains cf the primitive and purely Oriental period are too scanty both in Phoenicia and Cyprus ; certain methods of production and certain ornamental motives are only known to us through these monu- ments of the transition. It is of great importance that motives taken from Egypt and Mesopotamia and the local practices of the Syrian workmen should be traced even in things governed as a whole by Greek taste ; we have no other means of showing how closely long practice and hereditary predisposition had attached these Oriental artists to methods and types which they continued to employ long after all their surroundings had changed, and after they themselves had begun to prefer Greek to their own national 1 History of Art in Ancient Egypt, 2 vols. 8vo (1883), and History of Art in Chaldcea and Assyria, 2 vols. 8vo (Chapman and Hall, 1884).