The favourite animal motives are the horse, the deer, and water-fowl. The first also appears in a plastic form, surmounting the covers of vases and forming a sort of handle. Usually a single animal is seen in a metope-like panel (cf. Fig. 84), and the frieze system is seldom found at this period. A curious conception is that of a lion or wolf devouring a man, whose legs are seen protruding from its mouth, and this appears to have been adopted by the Etruscans, on whose archaic bronze-work and bucchero vases it sometimes occurs.[947] The lions on the Geometrical vases, it may be noted in passing, are obviously drawn without knowledge, and borrowed from Asiatic art; the same conventional type obtains at a later date, as in the Burgon lebes (below, p. 296). Human figures are almost confined to the large vases from the Dipylon cemetery, which are evidently a purely local product; almost the only exceptions are two from Boeotia (see below, p. 288), and one from Rhodes in the British Museum (A 439). The infantile and barbarous style of the figures recalls in a measure the primitive marble idols from the Cyclades; there is seldom any actual distinction of sex, the narrow waist, wide hips, and tapering limbs being apparently common to both. The figures being painted in plain silhouette, there is no attempt at rendering features. Where it is intended to represent a warrior, the body is completely hidden behind a shield of the Boeotian type [Boeotian shield], a ready resource of the artist for avoiding anatomical difficulties, which was also adopted later by his seventh-century Corinthian successors, except that in the latter case the shield is circular. The subjects include battles and naval scenes, dances of women hand in hand, and funeral processions. From the combination of ships with funeral scenes, it would seem that they were sometimes used for carrying the dead. A remarkable lebes recently acquired by the British Museum[948] is decorated with a large ship-of-war with two banks of rowers (bireme), and appears to represent a warrior landing therefrom on shore.[949] The funeral scenes on the great Dipylon vases are exceedingly elaborate, and exhibit a corpse drawn on a bier, accompanied by chariots and bands of mourning women beating their heads.[950] By a conventional attempt at perspective the figures are often placed above the central group when they are supposed to be on its farther side, just as, in the fresco from Tiryns, and an “Island-gem” of the Mycenaean period, a man leading a bull is represented over its back.[951]