§ V Cypriote Sculpture
If the very vestiges of Cypriote architecture have disappeared, it is not so with the works of the sculptor. The quarter of a century which has just passed has seen disinterred as if by enchantment from the bowels of the great eastern island, and then transported into the chief museums of Constantinople, Paris, London, Berlin, and especially New York, hundreds of stone statues and thousands of terra-cotta figurines of strange appearance, with picturesque head-dresses and with foolishly-smiling visages, which form a group apart in the history of art, since they are neither purely Asiatic nor purely Greek. Save in rare exceptions, the monuments of Cypriote sculpture were not imported from abroad; they are the work of that mixed race of Greeks and Asiatics, which, by means of the Phœnician ships, was in constant relation with Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor.
The productions of Cypriote sculpture which seem to be the most ancient remind us of the figures in the Assyrian bas-reliefs; the costume is the same: a conical cap, a curled beard, a long tunic, and a short cloak passed over the shoulder. However, there are essential differences: the muscles are far from being expressed with the same vigour; no figure wears that long beard like a regular screw, which is so characteristic of Ninevite sculpture. We feel that the Cypriote artist works at a distance from a model which he only sees with the eye of memory, or else that he imitates at second-hand, and is compelled to interpret a Phœnician work which is itself only an interpretation of an Assyrian prototype. The most ancient statues discovered in the temple of Golgoi may date back from the epoch at which the Assyrian conqueror Sargon erected at Citium (Larnaca) the triumphant stela on which he relates that his vessels have vanquished Cyprus. They are of all sizes. There is a colossal head 2 ft. 9½ in. high (fig. 214). It wears a conical helmet; the eyes are prominent, the nose is straight and regular, the mouth small but full-lipped, the cheek-bones projecting; the beard is composed of long parallel tresses slightly curled at the end. This fine head, more than half oriental, may be considered as the type of its kind.
After the overthrow of the Sargonid dynasty, Cyprus was given up to Egyptian influence, which reigned there during the period which extends from the fall of Nineveh, at the end of the seventh century B.C., to the Achæmenid dynasty. But here again the imitation is only partial, and not as servile as in Phœnicia. We find Egyptian fashion modified in Cyprus by the taste of a foreign race. The figures are half-nude instead of being entirely draped; they have no garment except the shenti, tied round the waist and adorned with uræi; the bust is bare; the arms are bare, but adorned with bracelets and held close to the body; the headdress is the Egyptian pshent scarcely modified; the hair, cut straight and falling in compact masses behind the beardless head, reminds us of the Klaft.94
During the same period, but especially under the Persian dominion, we witness the interpenetration of the two influences—that of Egypt and that of Assyria—in Cypriote art: it is the marriage of the two styles, the union of the two streams. In the statues at Athieno, for instance, the head is Assyrian in the features of the face, the curled beard and the headdress formed of a peaked cap, but all the rest is Egyptian: the nude torso, the necklace, the shenti round the waist quaintly loaded with ornaments, the symbolical meaning of which the artist no longer understands. A striking example of this hybrid style is the famous colossus of Amathus, which is 13 ft. 11½ in. high and 6½ ft. broad across the shoulders. He is a Hercules who offers a mixture of the athletic proportions of the Assyrian Izdubar, with the type of ugliness symbolized in the god Bes. He has short horns, a low forehead, large ears; his hair and beard are treated in the Assyrian manner; he has a lion’s skin round his waist; in his two powerful hands, pressed against his breast, he holds the hind paws of a lioness. Is he not the giant Izdubar, whom Assyrian artists so often took pleasure in representing? On the other hand, his tattooed arms, his hairy skin, his lion’s skin fastened round his body, his bestial and Silenus-like face, his legs like the paws of a wild beast, are all copied from those figures of the god Bes, which the excavations in the Nile valley bring to light by hundreds. At the same time the artist handles his chisel as a Greek might. The limbs are plump and rounded: no more of those exaggerated muscles which characterise Assyrian art; nothing Eastern in the insignificant features of the face. We have already, in certain points, the Hellenic Heracles, with whom the Cypriote god is soon to be confounded.
In fact, the third element which comes into Cypriote sculpture is the Greek element, with all its methods, as the colonies on the coast of Asia Minor understood them as early as the sixth century. In the year B.C. 500 Cyprus made an alliance with the cities of Ionia; and Cimon’s expedition in B.C. 450 determined the definite preponderance of Hellenic civilisation in that island. The statues in which Greek inspiration is recognised have something original which distinguished them at first sight (fig. 210). The physiognomy recalls that forced smile which has been called the Æginetan smile; the heads are freed from those conical head-dresses so dear to oriental art, which Greek art repudiated in order to replace them by a diadem or a high crown; the hair is no longer in ringlets and scarcely forms a row of flat curls to frame the forehead; the play of the drapery is quite different from that which comes from Nineveh, and reveals a good taste which is quite charming. In short, the Cypriote monuments, which correspond to this description, only form a branch of Greek archaic art, and we must no longer treat of them in a book devoted to the East. Let us only cite, as an example, the famous statue of the priest with the dove, which seems to date from the Græco-Persian period. It is a colossal statue 8 ft. high, representing a man holding in his hands a cup and a pigeon. His head-dress consists of a hemispherical cap which terminates in the head of an animal; three tresses of hair, a characteristic sign of Greek archaism, fall symmetrically from the back of his head on the front of each shoulder. The rows of curls in the beard which covers his mouth and chin are visibly imitated from the Assyrian fashion of dressing the hair. The fringes and draperies of the garment still remind us, indeed, as well as the square form of the shoulders and breast, of the statues of Tello; but how much more ample and harmoniously arranged they are! We have here Greek taste still imprisoned in the hieratic formula bequeathed to it by the East.
To the same Græcizing art belong all those iconic statues from the temples of Golgoi and Amathus, which, instead of the peaked cap or of the pshent, wear on their heads garlands of foliage or of narcissus, more or less high and more or less rich, but infinite in their variety. Like the statues found in Phœnicia to which we alluded above, they are portraits of priests, priestesses, or other personages who offer to the god for perpetuity the object which they hold in their hand: a flower, a fruit, a branch, a patera, a pyx, an alabastron, a bull’s head or a pigeon.
Few bas-reliefs have been noticed in Cyprus. However, a colossal statue of Heracles in the Græcizing style, found at Golgoi, had a pedestal decorated with a most remarkable bas-relief, reminding us of those in the Ninevite palaces. The ground is painted red to make the figures stand out; the relief is low and flat, the anatomical details of the figures are carefully studied and exaggerated in the Assyrian manner. The scene represents Heracles driving away the herds of Geryon, a subject which seems to be of Tyrian origin. Heracles, nude, with the lion’s skin on his back, was probably holding his bow, which has disappeared as well as his head; like the giant Izdubar, he is of colossal stature; before him is the dog Orthros, with three heads, already pierced by an arrow shot at him by Heracles; Eurytion flees with his herds; his beard and hair are treated in the Assyrian manner. He carries a whole tree, with which he was no doubt lashing his oxen; this tree is treated like those that figure on the walls of Nineveh.
Certain Cypriote sarcophagi are also decorated with Greek subjects, treated in the oriental manner: the birth of Chrysaor, who issues from the neck of Medusa, for instance, is seen; banqueting scenes and bull or boar hunts are found. A picture represented on the principal side of a sarcophagus from Amathus (fig. 218) is copied in servile fashion from the sculptures of Assyria and Egypt; there are rows of pearls, lotus-flowers and daisies; a climbing plant is even to be remarked here like the sacred tree on the Ninevite bas-reliefs. One of the figures holds the Asiatic umbrella, and the tassels of the horses are Assyrian. However, the figures of the cortège are Greek in style, attitude and costume. On the smaller sides are two oriental subjects: at one end four figures of Astarte in full face, of the type reproduced in profusion in Chaldæa and Phœnicia; at the other four figures of the god Pygmæus, who is made up, as we have seen, of Bes and Izdubar together.
In two words, Cypriote sculpture, fruitful as it is, lacks variety, like Egyptian sculpture and Assyrian sculpture, its two mistresses. It lives only by borrowing, and has invented nothing. What characterises the stone statues which it produced is immobility and hieratic stiffness, together with finish in the details and decoration. They have no features which proceed from a realistic study of nature. It has been remarked that these statues, intended to be set in rows along the inner walls of the temples, are scarcely at all modelled behind, and are flattened as if they had been carved out of slabs of insufficient thickness; moreover, though broad in the chest, they are narrow in the hips and feet; the legs are pressed closely together, so that they have to some degree the appearance of reversed cones. Cypriote art has no originality except in the Hellenic element, which it assimilates; the Cypriote artist is a Greek who has served his apprenticeship among the Orientals.