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Phoenician ceramic art disappointing

Still, on the whole, the Cyprian ceramic art is somewhat disappointing. What is original in it is either grotesque, as the vases in the shape of animals, or those crowned by human heads, or those again which have for spout a female figure pouring liquid out of a jug. What is superior has the appearance of having been borrowed. Egyptian, Assyrian, and Greek art, each in turn, furnished shapes, designs, and patterns to the Phoenician potters, who readily adopted from any and every quarter the forms and decorations which hit their fancy. Their fancy was, predominantly, for the /bizarre/ and the extravagant. Vases in the shape of helmets, in the shape of barrels, in the shape of human heads, have little fitness, and in the Cyprian specimens have little beauty; the mixture of Assyrian with Egyptian forms is incongruous; the birds and beasts represented are drawn with studied quaintness, a quaintness recalling the art of China and Japan. If there is elegance in some of the forms, it is seldom a very pronounced elegance; and, where the taste is best, the suspicion continually arises that a foreign model has been imitated. Moreover, from first to last the art makes little progress. There seems to have been an arrest of development. The early steps are taken, but at a certain point stagnation sets in; there is no further attempt to improve or advance; the artists are content to repeat themselves, and reproduce the patterns of the past. Perhaps there was no demand for ceramic art of a higher order. At any rate, progress ceases, and while Greece was rising to her grandest efforts, Cyprus, and Phoenicia generally, were content to remain stationary.

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