Fig. 233.—Patera from Palestrina. (Kircher Museum, Rome.)
chiselled, engraved, or even hammered in repoussé. The skill of the Tyrian and Sidonian artists in this branch of art was celebrated from the highest antiquity. Solomon appeals to them for the furniture of Jehovah’s Temple; in Homer, Achilles offers as a prize for the races, in the games organised for the funeral of Patroclus, “a crater of chiselled silver, holding six measures, and without rival on earth for beauty: skilful Sidonian craftsmen made it;” elsewhere the poet speaks of a silver crater, the work of Hephaistos, which a king of Sidon gives to Menelaus. The Phœnician dishes found at Nimroud ([fig. 92]), in Cyprus, and at some points of the Mediterranean coasts, are specimens of those goldsmiths’ works which astonished Homer’s Greeks. They are pateræ without feet, shallow and hemispherical, such as those seen in the hands of the Assyrians in the bas-reliefs of Nineveh. The figures which decorate them are on the inner surface, and arranged in concentric zones. Engraved or hammered in repoussé, these subjects seem sometimes to represent, not trivial figures nor images of deities, but, on the contrary, genre pictures, and scenes like those in the Egyptian paintings. Thus the subject which decorates the silver-gilt patera (fig. 233) discovered in 1876 at Palestrina, the ancient Præneste, in Latium, has been ingeniously explained by M. Clermont-Ganneau.[99] In the concentric zone bordered by a long serpent a small drama is developed in relief in a series of successive phases; it might be called “A Hunting Day, or Piety Rewarded. An oriental play in two acts and nine tableaux.” We see: (1) the hero leaving his house in his war-chariot; (2) he alights to shoot a deer; (3) capture of the deer; (4) halt in a wood after the hunt; the horses are unharnessed; (5) preparations for the meal, in which the deer is to be eaten; (6) an ape attacks the hero, who, fortunately, is protected by a winged deity; (7) the ape is pursued and thrown down by the horses; (8) the hunter kills the savage beast; (9) triumphal entry into the house. The interpretation would be complete if a mythical name could be given to the hero of the drama.
Fig. 234.—Dish from Dali. (Louvre.)
Hunting scenes of the same kind, but not so easy to explain, decorate a silver dish from Cære in Etruria, of the same manufacture as the pateræ of Phœnicia, or Cyprus. On one of the silver dishes from Dali (Idalion) possessed by the Louvre, there is a lion hunt; on the patera from Amathus there is the siege of a fortress.