Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/241

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF PHRYGIAN CIVILIZATION. 225 reproduce on stone all the shapes that made up the wooden house in which he lived, together with the patterns the women around him worked in the loom. If his decorative scheme is neither rich nor varied, it has yet the merit of being a faithful portraiture of the homely scenes in which it arose, and of having been kept within the limits imposed upon it by the material at hand. If it cannot be denied that the period covered by the frontispieces of the Midas necropolis is, in some respects, much the most interesting for the historian, it does not help us to understand how so simple, one might almost say so poor an ornamentation, can have succeeded one in which the living form and its poten- tial diversity held so large a place. Art, like poetry, is progres- sive, and does not move from the complex to the simple, but follows an inverse course. It is possible that the clumsy pictures on the flanks of the colossal Kumbet ram, those modelled about the Yapuldak tomb by so unskilful a hand as to render it almost impossible to guess the kind of animal they stand for, as well as the rough-drawn images of Cybele seen near the tombs and sanctuaries of the plateau, preceded what may be termed the classic age of Phrygian art ; but the whole group of the Ayazeen necropolis bespeaks a later epoch. The architecture is more complicated and of quite a different nature. Nothing in it betrays imitation of a timber construction ; neither the columns with their varied capitals, nor the membering of mouldings with their elaborate profiles and wealth of subjects, nor the general arrangement in which the curved forms of the portico mingle with combinations of straight lines, which elsewhere cover the whole field. At the same time sculpture, properly so called, has assumed an importance it had not in the other series of monuments. Griffins and winged sphinxes abound ; gigantic lions are set to watch at the threshold of sanctuaries and tombs, whilst others, of smaller calibre, are seen in pairs within the tympans of frontals. Nor is this all ; the human form looks out of at least two of the better class of tombs, and furnishes the theme of a large bas- relief belonging to that fine hypogeum, the destruction of which is so much to be regretted. M. Ramsay's patient labour among these fragments, in the course of which he succeeded in turning about and uncovering nearly all those that originally decorated the main wall, has caused him to abandon the hypothesis he had at first taken up. There is nothing in it to recall Capadocian VOL. I. Q