The island of Sardinia has furnished a prodigious number of Phoenician seals.  A single private collection contains as many as six hundred.[7114] They are mostly scarabs, and the type of them is mostly Egyptian.  Sometimes they bear the forms of Egyptian gods, as Horus, or Thoth, or Anubis;[7115] sometimes cartouches with the names of kings as Menkara, Thothmes III., Amenophis III., Seti I., &c.;[7116] sometimes mere sacred emblems, as the winged uraeus, the disk between two uraei,[7117] and the like.  Occasionally there is the representation of a scene with which the Egyptian bas-reliefs have made us familiar:[7118] a warrior has caught hold of his vanquished and kneeling enemy by a lock of his hair, and threatens him with an axe or mace, which he brandishes above his head.  Or a lion takes the place of the captive man, and is menaced in the same way.  Human figures struggling with lions, and lions killing wild bulls, are also common;[7119] but the type in these cases is less Egyptian than Oriental.

Phoenician painting was not, like Egyptian, displayed upon the walls of temples, nor was it, like Greek, the production of actual pictures for the decoration of houses.  It was employed to a certain extent on statues, not so as to cover the entire figure, but with delicacy and discretion, for the marking out of certain details, and the emphasising of certain parts of the design.[7120] The hair and beard were often painted a brownish red; the pupil of the eye was marked by means of colour; and robes had often a border of red or blue.  Statuettes were tinted more generally, whole vestments being sometimes coloured red or green,[7121] and a gay effect being produced, which is said to be agreeable and harmonious.[7122] But the nearest approach to painting proper which was made by the Phoenicians was upon their vessels in clay, in terra-cotta, and in alabaster.  Here, though, the ornamentation was sometimes merely by patterns or bands,[7123] there were occasionally real attempts to depict animal and human forms, which, if not very successful, still possess considerable interest.  The noble amphora from Curium, figured by Di Cesnola,[7124] contains above forty representations of horses, and nearly as many of birds.  The shape of the horse is exceedingly conventional, the whole form being attenuated in the highest degree; but the animal is drawn with spirit, and the departure from nature is clearly intentional.  In the animals that are pasturing, the general attitude is well seized; the movement is exactly that of the horse when he stretches his neck to reach and crop the grass.[7125] In the birds there is equal spirit and greater truth to nature:  they are in various attitudes, preening their feathers, pecking the ground, standing with head erect in the usual way.  Other vases contain figures of cows, goats, stags, fish and birds of various kinds, while one has an attempt at a hippopotamus.  The attempts to represent the human form are certainly not happy; they remind us of the more ambitious efforts of Chinese and Japanese art.