Chapter III: Sculpture (5)

The truth of these observations is confirmed by the fact that when the chisel came to be used upon less unkindly materials, the Egyptian sculptor shook himself free of more than one of those despotic conventions which tyrannized over the makers of the royal colossi. The wooden statues have no supporting mass at the back or side; the legs are separated and free; the arms are no longer fixed to the sides, but are often bent into easy positions (Fig. 7, Vol. I., and Fig. 178). We may say the same of bronze (Figs. 179 and 180). We may judge of the freedom which was often given to works in the latter material by the beautiful little statuette figured upon this page (Fig. 256). The limestone figures are not so free. Convenient instruments for ridding them of superfluous stone were wanting, and, moreover, there was a certain temptation to imitate those statues in the harder rocks which were looked upon as the highest achievements of the national art. The figures were often supported by a mass of stone in which the posterior surfaces of the legs were imbedded. Sometimes, however, this support was absent, and in that case attitudes became extremely various (Fig. 48, Vol. I., and Figs. 192, 194, 195, Vol. II.), perfect ease and suppleness being often attained. Further confirmation of our theory is afforded by those little ornamental articles which may be referred to the industrial rather than the fine arts. In them we find the figures of men and animals introduced with the most playful and easy skill. The spontaneity of their grouping and the facility with which the most lively actions are pressed into the service of the artist, are remarkable. The graceful and almost athletic figures of swimming girls which form the handles of so many perfume spoons may be given as instances of this (Fig. 257). The qualities which are so conspicuous in these little works are absent from the official and monumental art of Egypt, because the materials and tools employed hindered their development and prevented the happy genius of the Egyptian people from reaching complete fruition.

This influence is to be recognized in the modelling as well as in the pose of Egyptian statues: their general forms are fairly well understood and expressed, but there is none of that power to suggest the muscles under the skin, and the bones under the muscles, which distinguishes Greek sculpture. The suppleness and elasticity of living flesh are entirely wanting. Everything is in its place, but details are as much suppressed as if the work were to be seen at a distance at which they would be invisible.

The admirable portraits which have been unearthed in such numbers and the skilful modelling of many an isolated work, prove that it was neither the power of observation nor that of manipulation that was wanting. Why, then, was it that the Egyptians failed to advance farther upon the road that led to mastery in their art? It was due to their infatuation for granite. Even when they worked in soft stone their manipulation was governed by the capabilities of the more stubborn material. The chisel alone can give those truthful and delicate contours without which no sculpture can reach perfection, and the chisel could hardly be used on any material but limestone or wood. The granite or basalt statue, roughly blocked out with tools which imperfectly obeyed the hand, could only be brought to completion with the sand or emery of the polisher. No refinement of execution could be hoped for under such conditions. Every surface was flattened and every expressive ridge smoothed down, and the appearance of superficial finish thus obtained involved many sacrifices.

The abuse of this latter process is one of the great defects of Egyptian technique; but there was another, and, perhaps, more potent cause of failure. The method of writing adopted by the Egyptians, and elaborated at a very early date, must have had a greater effect upon their plastic arts than has generally been supposed. The characters employed by them, at least in monumental situations, were not merely symbols of sounds, as the characters of later syllabic or alphabetic forms of writing became; they were direct images of objects. Practical requirements soon led to the simplification of such objects, to the suppression of all details beyond those necessary for identification. The figures employed were thus soon reduced to mere empty outlines. Shadow and colour, all those details which distinguish the species of a genus and the individuals of a species, were carefully and systematically eliminated. The sign which stood for a lion or a man, was the same for all lions and all men, although between one man or one lion and another there are differences of stature, of age, of colour, of strength, and of beauty.

Now, in the early ages of Egyptian civilization, when the hieroglyphs in the Memphite necropolis were chiselled in relief, the same hand must have been employed upon the portraits of any particular inhabitants of a tomb and upon the inscriptions which accompanied them. Thus we find upon the panels from the tomb of Hosi (Figs. 174-6), that there is no appreciable difference between the technique of the figures and of the accompanying characters. The same firm and lively handling is visible in both. The images which play the part of written characters are much smaller than the three portraits, and that is all. The crafts of scribe and sculptor were thus combined in one man; his chisel traced indifferently funerary portraits and hieroglyphs. When the use of papyrus led to much and rapid writing, the two professions were separated. The scribe wrote sometimes with the kalem upon papyrus, sometimes with the brush or the point upon wood, stucco, or stone. But he always found enough to do in his own profession without combining it with another.

Sculptors and painters multiplied on their side with the multiplication of the royal and divine images; they represented the king fighting against the enemies of Egypt or returning thanks to the gods for their assistance, and the king's subjects accompanying him to battle, or busied over the varied labours of a civilized society. They had to observe life and to study nature. By dint of so doing they created a style, a certain method of looking at and interpreting natural facts which became common to all the artists of Egypt. One of the most striking features of this style is the continual endeavour to strip form of all that is accidental and particular, to generalize and simplify it as much as possible, a tendency which finds a very natural explanation in the early endeavours of the Egyptians to represent, in their writing, the concrete shapes of every being in earth or sky. This habit of making plastic epitomes of men and animals, and even of inanimate things, was confirmed by the persistent use of ideographic characters during all the centuries of Egyptian civilization. The profession of the scribe was in time separated from that of the sculptor, but the later preserved some of the marked characteristics which it put on before this division of labour was finally established. The Egyptian eye had become accustomed to see things represented in that simplified aspect of which the hieroglyphs are so striking an example, and to deprive individuals, by a kind of unconscious abstraction, of those details by which they stood out from their species as a whole.

The most original features of Egyptian sculpture and its arrested development must, then, be referred, on the one hand to the nature of the materials employed, and, on the other, to the habits contracted during many centuries of ideographic writing.[306] It has long been the fashion to attribute capital importance to what is called a canon, in describing the origin of the Egyptian style. The ideas which have been published on this question seem to us manifestly exaggerated; we must examine them a little closely.

[306] M. CH. BLANC had a glimmering of the great influence
exercised over the plastic style of Egypt by the hieroglyphs;
see his _Voyage dans la Haute-Égypte_, p. 354.

The word _canon_ comes from the Greek κάνων, a _rule_. As applied to the arts it has been defined as "a system of measurements by the use of which it should be possible to tell the size of any part by that of the whole, or the size of the whole by that of any one of its parts."[307] The idea of proportion, upon which every canon must rest, is a creation of the brain. A canon, therefore, is the result of those searching and comprehensive generalizations of which only races with great intellectual gifts are capable. Each of the arts may have its canon, or rule of proportion, establishing a proper relation between all the elements of its creations and easily expressible in figures.

[307] _Dictionnaire de l'Académie des Beaux-Arts_, under the
word _Canon_.

The finest examples of a canon as applied to architecture are furnished by the Greek orders. Given the smallest member of an Ionic or Doric order, the dimensions of all the other members of the column and its entablature may be calculated with almost complete accuracy. There is nothing of the kind in Egyptian architecture. There is no constant proportion between the heights and thicknesses of the shaft, the capital, and the entablature; there is no constant relation between their shapes. In a single building, and in a single order, we find proportions varying between one hall or court and another.

The word _canon_ has an analogous sense when applied to sculpture. We establish a canon when we say that a figure should be so many heads high, and that its limbs should bear a certain proportion to the same unit. It would be the same if, as has often been proposed, the medius of the hand were erected into the unit of measurement, except that the figure would then be divided into a larger number of parts. Both ancients and moderns have investigated this question, but we need not dwell upon the results of their inquiries. The Greeks had the canon of Polycletus; the Romans that of Vitruvius, while Leonardo da Vinci set an example to the numerous artists who have investigated the question since his time.[308]

[308] These researches are described in the chapter entitled
_Des Proportions du Corps Humain_ of M. CH. BLANC'S _Grammaire
des Arts du Dessin_, p. 38.

Had the Egyptians a canon? Did they choose some one part of the human body and keep all the other parts in a constant mathematical relation with it? Did their canon, if they had one, change with time? Is it true that, in deference to the said canon, all the artists of Egypt living at one time gave similar proportions to their figures?

It has sometimes been pretended that in each century the priests decided upon the dimensions, or at least upon the proportions, to be given by artists to their figures. Such an assertion can hardly be brought into harmony with the facts observed.

The often quoted words of Diodorus have been taken as a text: "The Egyptians claim as their disciples the oldest of the Greek sculptors, especially Telecles and Theodoros, both sons of Rhæcos, who executed the statue of the Pythian Apollo for the inhabitants of Samos. Half of this statue, it is said, was executed at Samos by Telecles, the other half at Ephesus by Theodoros, and the two parts so exactly fitted each other that the whole statue appeared to be the work of a single sculptor. After having arranged and blocked out their stone, the Egyptians executed the work in such fashion that all the parts adapted themselves one to another in the smallest details. To this end they divided the human figure into twenty-one parts and a quarter, upon which the whole symmetry of the work was regulated."[309]

[309] DIODORUS, i. 98, 5-7.

We may ask what authority should attach to the words of Diodorus, a contemporary of Augustus, in a matter referring to the Pharaonic period. But when the monuments began to be examined it was proclaimed that they confirmed his statements. Figures were found upon the tomb-walls which were divided into equal parts by lines cutting each other at right angles. These, of course, were the canonical standards mentioned by Plato and Diodorus.

Great was the disappointment when these squares were counted. In one picture containing three individuals, two seated figures, one beside the other, are inscribed in fifteen of the squares; a standing figure in front of them occupies sixteen.[310] Another figure is comprised in nineteen squares.[311] In another place we find twenty-two squares and a quarter between the sole of the foot and the crown of the head.[312] In yet another, twenty-three.[313] As for the division given by Diodorus, it never occurs at all, and in fact it is hardly to be reconciled with the natural punctuation of the human body by its articulation and points of section.

[310] LEPSIUS, _Denkmæler_, part iii. plate 12.

[311] _Ibid._ plate 78. It is in this division into nineteen
parts that M. Blanc finds his proof that the medius of the
extended hand was the canonical unit. (_Grammaire_, &c. p. 46.)

[312] At Karnak, in the granite apartments. See CHARLES BLANC,
_Voyage de la Haute-Égypte_, p. 232. Two figures upon the
ceiling of a tomb at Assouan are similarly divided.

[313] LEPSIUS, _Denkmæler_, part iii. p. 282.

To surmount the difficulty the theory of successive canons was started; some declared for two,[314] some for three.[315] This theory requires explanation also. Do its advocates mean that in all the figures of a single epoch there is a scale of proportion so constant that we must seek for its cause in an external peremptory regulation? If, however, we doubt the evidence of our eyes and study the plates in Lepsius or the monuments in our museums, measure in hand, we shall see at once that no such theory will hold water. Under the Ancient Empire proportions varied appreciably between one figure and another. As a rule they were short rather than tall; but while on the one hand we encounter certain forms of very squat proportions, amounting almost to deformity (Fig. 120, Vol. I.), we also find some whose forms are very lengthy (Fig. 101, Vol. I.). The artists of Thebes adopted a more slender type, but with them too we find nothing like a rigorous uniformity. Again, the elongation of the lower part of the body is much more strongly marked in the funerary statuettes (Fig. 50, Vol. I.) and in the paintings (Plate XII.) than in statues of the natural size (Figs. 211, 216) and in the colossi. If there had been a canon in the proper sense of the term its authority would have applied as much to those statuettes and bas-reliefs as to the full-sized figures. But, as a fact, the freedom of the artist is obvious; his conception is modified only by the material in which he worked. He could not make a great statue in stone too slender below, as it would want base and solidity; but as soon as he was easy on that score he allowed himself to be carried away by the temptation to exaggerate what seemed to him an especially graceful feature.

[314] EBERS, _Ægypten_, vol. ii. p. 54. PRISSE, _Histoire de
l'Art Égyptien_, text, pp. 124-128.

[315] LEPSIUS, _Ueber einige Kuntsformen_, p. 9. BIRCH, in
WILKINSON'S _Manners and Customs_, vol. ii. LEPSIUS,
_Denkmæler_, part ii. pl. 9, p. 270, note 3.

We see, then, that art in Egypt went through pretty much the same changes and developments as in other countries in which it enjoyed a long and busy life. Taste changed with the centuries. It began by insisting on muscular vigour, as displayed in great breadth of shoulder and thickset proportions generally. In later years elegance became the chief object, and slenderness of proportion was sometimes pushed even to weakness. In each of these periods all plastic figures naturally approached the type which happened to be in fashion, and in that sense alone is it just to assert that Egyptian art had two different and successive canons.

The question as to whether the Egyptians ever adopted a unit of measurement in their rendering of the human figure or not, is different. Wilkinson and Lepsius thought they had discovered such a unit in the length of the foot, Prisse and Ch. Blanc in that of the medius. There is nothing in the texts to support either theory, and an examination of the monuments themselves shows that sometimes one, sometimes the other of the two units, is most in accordance with their measurements. Between the Ancient Empire and the New proportions differed so greatly that it is impossible to refer them to one unit. Among the works of a single period we find some that may be divided exactly by one of the two; others which have a fraction too much or too little. It has not yet been proved, therefore, that the Egyptians ever adopted such a rigorous system as that attributed to them. Like all races that have greatly practised design, they established certain relations between one part of their figures and another, relations which gradually became more constant as the national art lost its freedom and vitality; and they arrived at last at the mechanical reproduction of a single figure without troubling themselves to calculate how many lengths of the head, the nose, the foot, or the medius, it might contain. Their eyes were their compasses, and they worked--at least under the New Empire and during the Græco-Roman period--from models which represented the experience of the past. It is therefore unnecessary to search for an explanation of the uniformity which characterises their works in the following of a rigid mathematical system; we must be content to see in it the natural result of an artistic education into which, as the centuries succeeded one another, the imitation of previous types, and the application of traditional recipes entered more and more.

As for the designs traced within lines which cross each other at regular intervals, they can be nothing but drawings squared for transferring purposes. _Squaring_ is the usual process employed by artists when they wish to repeat a figure in different dimensions from those of the original. Having divided the latter by horizontal and perpendicular lines cutting each other at regular intervals, they go through the same operation upon the blank surface to which the figure is to be transferred, making the lines equal in number to those upon the original, but the resulting squares larger if the copy is to be larger, smaller if it is to be smaller, than that original. Egyptian decorators often made use of this process for the transference of sketches upon papyrus, stone, or wood, to the wall. Of this practice we give two examples. The first is an elaborate composition in which several modifications and corrections of lines and attitudes may be traced (Fig. 258); the second is an isolated figure (Fig. 259). In each case the figures extend vertically over nineteen squares. The first dates from the eighteenth, the second from the nineteenth dynasty.[316]

[316] PRISSE, _Histoire de l'Art Égyptien_.

The same device is sometimes made use of to transfer heads, and even animals, from a small sketch to the wall. In the tomb of Amenophis III., in the Bab-el-Molouk, there is a fine portrait of a prince thus squared;[317] at Beni-Hassan we find a cow and an antelope treated in the same fashion.[318]

[317] LEPSIUS, _Denkmæler_, part iii. pl. 70.

[318] _Ibid._ plate 152.

Traces of another and yet more simple process are to be found. Before drawing the figures in his bas-reliefs the artist sometimes marked in red on the walls the vertical and horizontal lines which would give the poise of the body, the height of the shoulders and armpits, and of the lower edge of the drawers. The positions of secondary anatomical points were marked upon these lines, and the whole formed a rough guide for the hand of the designer.[319]

[319] PRISSE, _Histoire de l'Art Égyptien_, text, p. 123.
LEPSIUS, _Denkmæler_, pl. 65.

The fact that these lines and squares are only found upon a small number of paintings and bas-reliefs does not prove that their employment was in any way exceptional. It is probable that one of the two processes was generally used, but that the colour spread both upon figures and ground hides their traces. The few pictures in which they are now to be traced were never completed.

Most of the painters and sculptors to whom the decorations of tombs and temples were confided must have had recourse to these contrivances, but here and there were artists who had sufficient skill and self-confidence to make their sketches directly upon the wall itself. More than one instance of this has been discovered in those Theban tombs whose decorations were left unfinished. In a few cases the design has been made in red chalk by a journeyman and afterwards corrected, in black chalk, by the master.[320]

[320] Upon the preparation of the bas-relief, see BELZONI,
_Narrative of the Operations_, etc. p. 175.

PRISSE gives several interesting examples of these corrected
designs, among others a fine portrait of Seti I. (_Histoire_,
etc. vol. ii.)

Examples of these corrections are to be found in sculpture as
well as in painting. Our examination of the sculptures at Karnak
showed that the artist did not always follow the first sketch
traced in red ink, but that as the work progressed he modified
it, and allowed himself to be guided, to some extent, by the
effects which he saw growing under his hands. The western wall
of the hypostyle hall contains many instances of this. It is
decorated with sculptures on a large scale, in which the lines
traced by the chisel differ more or less from those of the
sketch. (_Description, Ant._ vol. ii. p. 445.)

As the bas-relief was thus preceded a sketch which was more or less liable to modification, it would seem probable that a similar custom obtained in the case of the statue. It appears especially unlikely that those great figures in the harder rocks which represented such an enormous outlay of manual labour, would be attacked without some guide which should preserve them from the chance of ruin by some ill-considered blow. Did the Egyptian sculptor begin, then, with a clay sketch? There is no positive information on the subject, but in all those numerous bas-reliefs which represent sculptors at work, there is not one in which the artist has before him anything in the shape of a model or sketch to guide him in his task. It is possible that the sameness of his statues, especially of his colossal figures in granite or sandstone, enabled the Egyptian to dispense with an aid which the infinite variety of later schools was to render necessary.

The Egyptian sculptor was contented with a few simple attitudes which he reproduced again and again. He doubtless began by marking the salient points and relative heights of the different parts upon his block. The rock was so hard that there was little risk of his journeymen spoiling the material by taking away too much, supposing them to be carefully overlooked. Marble would have been far more liable to such an accident. Even Michael Angelo, when he worked the marble with his own hands, spoilt more than one fine block from Carrara.

Although we have no evidence to show that the Egyptians understood the use of clay models, we have some idea of the process by which they were enabled to do without them, and of the nature of their professional education. The chief Egyptian museums possess works which have been recognized as graduated exercises in the technique of sculpture. They are of limestone, and of no great size--from four to ten inches high. The use of these little models is shown to have been almost universal by the fact that Mariette found them on nearly every ancient site that he excavated. Their true character is beyond doubt.[321] At Boulak there are twenty-seven sculptured slabs which were found at Tanis. One is no more than a rough sketch, just begun. By its side is a completed study of the same subjects. Some of these slabs are carved on both sides; on others we find one motive treated twice, side by side, once in the state of first sketch, and again as a finished study. The plaques which bear the heads of cynocephali, of lions and lionesses, are remarkable for the freedom of their execution (Figs. 260, 261, and 262).[322] The same may be said of fifteen royal heads found at Sakkarah. They should be examined together. They range[323] in order from No. 623, which is a roughly-blocked-out sketch, to 637, a finished head. One of these models is divided down the middle, so as to give accent to the profile. A few of them are squared in order to test the proportions. But even here no canon of proportion is to be found. "If the squares were based upon some unchanging unit, they would be identical in every model in which they occur. But in one of these heads we find three horizontal divisions between the uræus and the chin; in another four. In most cases the number of the squares seems to have been entirely due to the individual caprice or convenience of the artist. There are but two examples in which another rule seems to have been followed; in them the proportions of the squares are identical, and their intersections fall upon the same points. All that may be fairly deduced from this, however, is that they are the work of the same hands."[324] A second series of royal heads was found at Tanis; others have been discovered in the Fayoum. Boulak also possesses models of the ram, the jackal, and the uræus, of arms, legs, hands, &c. Upon a plaque from Tanis the figure of Isis appears twice, once as a sketch and once as a finished study.

[321] MARIETTE, _Notice du Musée_, Nos. 623-688.

[322] Nos. 652-654 of the _Notice du Musée_.

[323] In the Boulak catalogue.

[324] MARIETTE, _La Galerie de l'Égypte Ancienne à l'Éxposition
du Trocadéro_, pp. 69, 70.

From the style of these remains Mariette is disposed to think that they were not earlier than the Saite epoch. As the Egyptian intellect gradually lost its inventive powers, the study of such models as these must have played a more and more important part in artistic education; but we have no reason to believe that their use was confined to the later ages of the monarchy. As artists became accustomed to reproduce certain fixed types, they gradually lost their familiarity with nature, and their works became ever more uniform and monotonous. This tendency is to be easily recognized in Egyptian work long before the days of Amasis and the Psemetheks; in some degree it is found even in the productions of the Ancient Empire. The use of the models in question may have become general at the beginning of the Middle Empire. But their introduction was not due to the priests, but to the masters in the arts, who saw that they offered a sure and rapid method of instructing their scholars.

* * * * *

Yet one more cause of the monotony of type which distinguished Egyptian art after its first renascence remains to be noticed. The Egyptians were fully conscious of the great antiquity of their civilization. They thought of other nations much as the Greeks and Romans of a later age thought of those whom they called barbarians. When the scribes had to speak of foreigners they made use of a complete vocabulary of contemptuous terms, and, as always occurs, the pride of race upon which they were based long survived the condition of things which formed its justification. The Greek conquest was necessary to cure the Egyptians of their disdain, or, at least, to compel them to hide it. Now the visible sign of their superiority was the beauty of the national type, as elaborated by judicious selection and represented in art since the earliest days of the monarchy. The Egyptian was proud of himself when he compared the refined features of his gods and kings, their graceful attitudes and smiling looks, with the thick and heavy lines of the negro or the hard and truculent features of the Libyan and the Syrian nomad. In attempting to innovate, some danger of lowering the nobility of the type would be incurred. The pressure of neighbouring races ended by throwing back the Egyptian frontiers. At one time they were forcibly curtailed by victorious invasion; at others they were weakened here and there, allowing the entrance of the shepherds, of foreign merchants, and of mercenaries of various nationalities. The purity of the Egyptian blood was menaced, and at all hazards it was necessary to preserve without alteration the ideal image of the race, the concrete emblem of its glorious past and the pledge of its high destinies. It was thus that in Egypt progress was hampered by fear of retrogression. Perfection is impossible to those who fear a fall.

Another obstacle that helped to prevent the Egyptians from reaching the perfection which their early achievements seemed to promise, was their love for colour. They did not establish a sufficiently sharp line of demarcation between painting and sculpture. They always painted their statues, except when they carved them in materials which had a rich natural hue of their own, a hue to which additional vivacity was given by a high polish. By this means varied tints were obtained which were in harmony with the polychromatic decoration which was so near their hearts. Their excuse is to be found in their ignorance of statuary marble and of the clear and flesh-like tones and texture which it puts on under the sculptor's chisel.

The Egyptians, however, never committed the fault of colouring their statues in an imitative fashion, like those who make wax figures. Their hues were always conventional. Moreover, they were never either broken or shaded, which is sufficient to show that no idea of realistic imitation was implied in their use.[325] Sculpture is founded upon an artificial understanding by which tangible form and visible colour are dissociated from each other. When the sculptor looks to the help of the painter he runs great risk of failing to give all the precision and beauty of which form by itself is capable, to his work. Even the Greeks did not grasp this truth at once. The Egyptians had at least a glimmering of it, and we must thank them for having employed polychromy in their sculpture in a discreet fashion.

[325] CH. BLANC, _Voyage de la Haute-Égypte_, p. 99.

§ 10. _The General Characteristics of the Egyptian Style._

We have attempted to give an idea of the origin of Greek sculpture, of its development and its decadence. We have noticed those slow changes of taste and style which sometimes required a thousand years for their evolution, for a century in Egypt was hardly equal to a generation elsewhere. After proving that Egypt did not escape the universal law of change, we studied the methods and conventions which were peculiar to her sculptors and impressed their works with certain common characteristics. The union of these characteristics formed the Egyptian style. We must now define that style, and attempt to make its originality clear to our readers.

In its commencement Egyptian art was entirely realistic. It was made realistic both by the conceptions which presided at its birth and by the wants which it was called upon to satisfy. The task to which it applied itself with a skill and conscience which are little less than marvellous, was the exact representation of all that met its vision. In the bas-relief it reproduced the every-day scenes of agricultural life and of the national worship; in the statue it portrayed individuals with complete fidelity. But even in those early ages imagination was not asleep. It was continually seeking to invent forms which should interpret its favourite ideas. It figured the exploits of the king, the defender of the national civilization, in the form of a warrior brandishing his mace over the heads of his enemies. In the royal statues everything combined to mark the gulf between the Pharaoh and his subjects, their materials, size, attitude, and expression, although in natural life there can have been no such distinction. Finally the Great Sphinx at Gizeh is sufficient to prove that the Egyptians, in their endeavour to make the great deities whom they had conceived visible to the eye, had attempted to create composite types of which the elements were indeed existent in nature, but separate and distinct.

After the first renascence their imaginations played more freely. They multiplied the combinations under which their gods were personified. They transformed and idealized the human figure by the gigantic proportions which they gave to it in the seated statues of the king, and in those upright colossi in which the majesty of Pharaoh and the divinity of Osiris are combined in one individual. The sculptors portrayed the king in attitudes which had never been seen by mortal eyes. Sometimes he is seated upon the knee of a goddess and drawing nourishment from her breast; sometimes he bends, like a respectful and loving son, before his father Amen, who blesses him, and seems by his gesture to convey to him some of his own omnipotence and immortality. Again he is presented to us in the confusion of battle, towering so high above his adversaries that we can only wonder how they had the temerity to stand up against him. Events hardly passed thus in those long and arduous campaigns against the Khetas and the _People of the sea_, in which more than one of the Theban Pharaohs spent their lives. Victory, when it was victory, was long and hotly disputed. Superiority of discipline and armament told at last and decided the contest in favour of the Egyptians, who were inferior in strength and stature to most of their enemies, especially to those who came from Asia Minor and the Grecian islands.

It is hardly just, therefore, to say, as has been said,[326] that "Egyptian art had only one aim, the exact rendering of reality; in it all qualities of observation are developed to their utmost capabilities, those of imagination are wanting." Egyptian art is not like the sensitized plate of the photographer. It does not confine itself to the faithful reproduction of the objects placed before it. Painters and sculptors were not content, as has been pretended, with the art that can be _seen_, as opposed to the art that can be _imagined_, and an injustice is done to them by those who would confine the latter to the Aryan race. The apparent precision of such an assertion makes it all the more misleading. Egyptian art was realistic in its inception and always remained so to a certain degree, but with the passage of time the creative intellect began to play a part in the production of plastic works; it added to and combined the elements which it took from nature, and thus created imaginary beings which differed from natural fact by their proportions, their beauty, and their composition. The Egyptian artist had his ideal as well as the Greek.

[326] E. MELCHIOR DE VOGÜE, _Chez les Pharaons_.

In saying, then, that the art of Egypt was realistic, we have only laid the first stone of the definition we wish to establish. Its original character was, perhaps, still more due to another feature, namely to its elimination or suppression of detail. This elimination, far from diminishing with time, went on increasing as the country grew older. It may be traced to the action of two causes. In the first place, the influence of the ideographic writing upon the national style can hardly be exaggerated. The concrete images of things could only be introduced into it by means of simplification and generalization. In such a school the eye learnt to despoil form of all those details which were merely accidental, of all that made it particular. It sought for the species, or even the genus, rather than the individual. This tendency was increased by the peculiar properties of the materials upon which the Egyptians lavished their skill and patience. The harder rocks turned the edges of their bronze chisels, and compelled them to choose between roughly-blocked-out sketches and a laborious polish which obliterated all those minor details of modelling which should vary according to the sex, the age, and the muscular exertion of the persons represented. We see, then, that the rebellious nature of the granite, and the imperfect methods which it imposed, completed the lessons begun by that system of figured writing which dates from the remotest periods of Egyptian civilization.

There is an obvious contradiction between the tendency which we have just noticed, and those habits of realistic imitation whose existence has been explained by the desire to secure a posthumous existence for the dead. The history of Egyptian sculpture, is, in fact, the history of a contest in the mind of the artist between these two opposing forces. In the early years of the monarchy, his first duty was to supply a portrait statue, the chief merit of which should lie in the fidelity of its resemblance. Of this task he acquitted himself most skilfully and conscientiously, reproducing every individual peculiarity, and even deformity of his model. His chief attention was given to the face, as being the member by which men are principally distinguished one from another. Even then, and in the funerary statues, the body was much more general in its forms than the head. In the course of succeeding ages the sculptor was able, whenever he wished to make a faithful portrait either of an individual man or of a race, to bring this faculty into play and to clearly mark the differences between races or between the individuals of a race, by the varying character of the head. But yet his art showed an ever increasing tendency to follow the bent which had been given to it by the practice of glyptic writing, and by the long contest with unkindly materials. After the close of the Ancient Empire Egyptian art became ambitious of a higher style. Under the Theban Pharaohs it worked hard to attain it, and it knew no better means to the desired end than the continual simplification and generalization of form.

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This is the great distinguishing characteristic of the Egyptian style. The uniformity, stiffness, and restraint of the attitudes, the over-rigorous symmetry of the parts and of the limbs, and the close alliance of the latter with the bodies, are only secondary features. We shall find them in the works of every race compelled to make use of materials that were either too hard or too soft. Moreover, these are the constant characteristics of archaic art, and it must not be forgotten that even in Egypt many wooden and limestone figures have been unearthed which surprise us by the freedom of their attitudes and movements. The true originality of the Egyptian style consists in its deliberately epitomizing that upon which the artists of other countries have elaborately dwelt, in its lavishing all its executive powers upon chief masses and leading lines, and in the marvellous judgment with which it seizes their real meaning, their proportions, and the sources of their artistic effect.

As figures increased in size this tendency towards the suppression of detail increased also, and so too did their fitness for the architectonic _rôle_ they had to play. The colossi which flank the entrances to an Egyptian temple have been often criticised from an erroneous standpoint. They have been treated as if they were meant to be self-sufficient and independent. Their massiveness and want of vitality have been blamed; it has been said that the seated figures could not rise, nor the standing ones walk. To form a just estimate of their merit we must take them with the monuments of which they formed a part. We must rouse our imaginations, and picture them to ourselves with their flanking colonnades about them, with the pylons at their backs, and the obelisks at their sides. We must close our eyes for a moment and reconstruct this combination of architectural and sculpturesque lines. We shall then readily perceive how entirely these colossi were in harmony with their surroundings. Their vertical and horizontal lines echoed those of the monument to which they were attached. The rhythm of the long colonnades was carried on by their repetition of a single attitude, while their colossal dimensions and immovable solidity brought them into complete accord with the huge structures by which they were surrounded. It has been said that, more than any of its rivals, "the architecture of Egypt impresses us with the idea of absolute stability, of infinite duration." Could anything be in more complete harmony with such an art than the grave and majestic attitudes of these seated Pharaohs, attitudes which from every line breathe a profound calm, a repose without change and without end.