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.
Fig. 214.—Colossal head from Athieno. (New York Museum.)
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.