Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/245

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CYPRIOT SCULPTURE. 221 the island shows this peculiar handling. Again, the combination of details of dress and ornament taken from Egypt and Mesopo- tamia, with obvious signs of the influence of Greek archaism, is to be found nowhere else. The Greeks of Cyprus had certain peculiarities which are not to be found in their race outside the island. They seem to have been no fonder of gymnastic exercises than their neighbours of Citium and Amathus, and, consequently, they were not accustomed to the nudity of the palaestra, and even when they had gone to school to their Greek masters they never acquired either a knowledge of the nude or a taste for it. Their sculpture remained a draped sculpture from first to last. It was also monotonous and without variety. It would seem that they carved stone simply and solely to honour their gods, to commemorate some act of piety ; they never copied nature for its own sake for the pleasure of rendering the beauty of form and movement. Nearly all their statues are in absolute repose. The feet are together, or separated only by a very narrow interval. Very rarely do we encounter a walking figure or one in which the weight is borne more by one leg than the other ; very rarely, too, are the arms detached from the body. As a rule they hang down at the sides ; one of the two is almost invariably in that attitude, and then the other is bent across the chest. In the few cases in which a different pose is adopted the fore-arm is thrust straight out from the body. The graceful archer resting on the ground with one knee and bending his bow, is no Cypriot figure in spite of its discovery at Golgos ; both its movements are thoroughly Greek. 1 It shows no sign of the tradition to which all the unknown sculptors whose works we have reproduced remained so faithful. All these fixed and long established habits had a curious result ; they gave to Cypriot sculpture a look of originality to which it had no claim, and they have led more than one archaeologist to believe that certain heads found at Athieno and Dali were true portraits. 2 It is beyond dispute that the heads in question are not exactly similar to each other. By carefully selecting those which differ the most, a number could be brought together which 1 CESNOLA, Cyprus, p. 155. 2 This was the opinion of M. FR. LENORMANT. See his article signed E. de Chanot, and entitled, Statues iconiques du Temple d 1 Athienau, dans rile de Cypre, p. 197 ( Gazette arch'eologique, 1878, pp. 192-201).