Fig. 258.—Design transferred by squaring. From Prisse.
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]
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]
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]
Fig. 259.—Design transferred by squaring. From Prisse.
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.
Fig. 260.—Head of a Cynocephalus.
Fig. 261.—Head of a Lion.
Fig. 262.—Head of a Lioness.
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.
§ 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.
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.
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.
CHAPTER IV.
PAINTING.
§ 1. Technical Processes.
Most of our observations upon Egyptian sculpture are applicable to the sister art of painting. The conventions which form the characteristic originality of the Egyptian style were established by the sculptor; but when the artist had to draw the outline of a form, and to fill it in with colour instead of cutting it upon the naked surface of the wall, the difference of process did not affect his method of comprehending and interpreting his models. We find the same qualities and the same defects. The purity of line, the nobility of pose, the draughtsmanship at once just and broad, the ignorance of perspective, and the constant repetition of traditional attitudes are found in both methods. Painting, in fact, never became an independent and self-sufficing art in Egypt. It was commonly used to complete sculpturesque effects, and it never freed itself from this subordination. It never attempted to make use of its own peculiar resources for the expression of those things which sculpture could not compass—the depths of space, the recession of planes, the varieties of hue which passion spreads over the human countenance, and the nature and intensity of the feelings which are thus betrayed. We may say that it is only by some abuse of terms that we can speak of Egyptian painting at all. No people have spread more colour upon stone and wood than the Egyptians; none have had a more true instinct for colour harmony; but yet they never attempted to express, by the gradation of tone, by the juxtaposition or superposition of tints, the real aspects of the surfaces which present themselves to our eyes, aspects which are unceasingly modified by the amount of light or shadow, by distance and the state of the atmosphere. They had not the least glimmering of what we call chiaroscuro or of aerial perspective.
Their painting rests upon conventions as audacious as those of their sculpture. In it every surface has an uniform and decided value though in nature everything is shaded. A nude figure is all one colour—dark for a man, light for a woman. A drapery has but one tone, the artist never seeming to trouble himself whether it be in light or shadow, or partly in one partly in the other. In a few plates in Lepsius, and still more in Prisse,[327] there are suggestions that an artist here and there, more skilful than his rivals, understood that values differed, and distinguished in his more careful work between colour in shadow and colour in light. One or two contours appear to hint at the rotundity of chiaroscuro. In accepting such a suggestion, however, we should be making a mistake against which we have been warned even by such early travellers as the authors of the Description.[328] The effects in question must be placed to the credit of the sculptor. The images in which they appear are painted bas-reliefs, and the slight shadow thrown by their salient grounds gives an appearance of half-tint to their contours. Wherever pictures are without relief there is no such appearance, and yet changes of value would in them be more useful than elsewhere.
To place unbroken colours in juxtaposition to each other without transitions is to illuminate; it is not painting in the true sense of the word, and its practitioner is an artisan rather than an artist. The artist is he who traces the design upon the walls, who, chalk in hand, sketches the forms of men and women and the lines of the ornament. Many of these sketches are admirable for the freedom and breadth of their outline. The portrait of Amenophis III. which is to be seen in his tomb in the Bab-el-Molouk is a good example of these master-studies (Fig. 263). When nothing interfered to prevent the completion of the work, the painter came with his palette and brushes to spread colour over the spaces enclosed by these lines. Nothing could be easier than his task. He was only required to lay his colours smoothly, and to avoid overpassing the boundaries laid down for him. The hues of the flesh and of the draperies were fixed in advance as well as those of the various objects which were repeatedly introduced in such works.
Fig. 263.—Outline for a portrait of Amenophis III. Champollion, pl. 232.
At Beni-Hassan, and in several of the Theban tombs, there are representations of the painter at work. When he had to spread a single tint over a large surface—brown, for instance, upon the whole superficies of a limestone statue—we see him seated upon a kind of stool, his pot of colour in his left hand, his brush in his unsupported right (Fig. 54 Vol. I.). Sometimes his work was more complicated than this. There are a few royal portraits, and a few scenes with numerous actors, in which the whole scale of tints at his command must have been required. He then makes use of a palette. Specimens of these palettes are to be seen in every museum. They are rectangular pieces of wood, of alabaster, or of enamelled earthenware. They usually have seven little colour cups, but a few have as many as eleven or twelve. Small styles, as large as a crow-quill, have been found with these palettes. The use of these has been much discussed. Prisse cut one and steeped it in water. It was then discovered that the reed of which it was composed became a brush when its fibres were thus softened by moisture.[329] None of the large brushes which must have been used to spread the colour over considerable surfaces have been discovered, but Prisse believes that they too must have been made of fibrous reeds, such as the sarmentose stems of the Salvadora persica. Others think that for such purposes the hair pencil must have been employed.
Cakes of colour have sometimes been found in the tombs, together with earthenware mortars and pestles for grinding them. The tints usually employed were yellow, red, blue, green, brown, white, and black. These correspond to the seven cups hollowed in most of the palettes. They each included several varieties. Some of these colours were vegetable, such as indigo; others—and these more numerous—were mineral. Among the latter is a certain blue, which has preserved all its brilliancy even after so many centuries. Its merits were extolled by Theophrastus and Vitruvius. It is an ash with wonderful power of resisting chemical agents, and neither turning green nor black with exposure to the air. It must have been composed, we are told, of sand, copper-filings, and subcarbonate of soda reduced to powder and burnt in an oven. Copper is also the colouring principle, at least in our days, of those greens which are more or less olive in tone. Different shades of red, yellow, and brown, were obtained from the ochres. Their whites, formed of lime, of plaster, or of powdered enamel, have sometimes preserved a snowy whiteness beside which our whitest papers seem grey.[330] As for violet, Champollion tells us that no colour used by the ancients had that value. In those few bas-reliefs in which it is now found, it is a result of the changes which time has spread over surfaces originally gilded. The hue in question is caused, we are told, by the mordant or other preparation upon which the gold was laid.[331]
OFFERINGS TO THE DEAD
FRAGMENT OF A FUNERARY PAINTING ON PLASTER
(XVIIIth Dynasty)
In the Theban tombs the figures are first drawn and then painted upon a fine coat which has all the polish of stucco. It seems to consist of a very fine plaster and a transparent glue. It is still white where no tint has been laid upon it; here and there its shining surface is still undimmed.[332] When the pictures were executed upon wood or, as in the mummies, upon linen laid down upon a thin layer of plaster, a preparatory coat of white was always spread in the first instance. The tints became more brilliant over such a coat, the most opaque being in some degree transparent.[333]
The paintings are, as a rule, free from cracks. The colours seem to have been mixed with water and some flexible gum like tragacanth.[334] M. Hector Leroux, who took impressions of many bas-reliefs during his visit to Egypt, is inclined to believe that the Egyptians sometimes mixed honey with their colours, as the makers of water-colours do now. In some of the tombs the painting became sticky when he laid his moistened paper upon their surfaces. In others no amount of wetting affected the surface of the colours, which remained as smooth and hard as enamel. Some Egyptian paintings are covered with a resinous varnish which has blackened with time and spoilt the colours upon which it is laid.[335] The same varnish was used for the mummy cases and gives them the dark hue which they now present. A few exceptionally well preserved examples permit us to suppose that their colours when fresh must have been much lighter in tone and more brilliant than they now appear. No such precaution was taken, as a rule, in the case of the frescos. Their surfaces were left free from a substance that could so greatly alter with time, and thanks partly to this, partly to the equality of temperature and to the dryness and tranquillity of the air, they have retained an incomparable freshness. The centuries have passed gently over them, but since all the world has taken to visiting Egypt, including even the foolish and ignorant, they have suffered greatly from the barbarity of tourists. Of this the state of those beautiful decorations in the tomb of Seti which have excited the admiration of all cultivated travellers, is a painful instance.
Several mummy masks are in existence which prove that encaustic painting, in which naphtha and wax were used, was employed by the Egyptians;[336] but this process does not seem to have been developed until after the Macedonian conquest. Speaking generally, we may say that the Egyptian method was distemper.
The Egyptians produced easel pictures as well as wall paintings. In one of the Beni-Hassan tombs two artists are represented painting animals upon a panel.[337] Herodotus tells us that Amasis presented his portrait to the people of Cyrene.[338] Supposing it to be the work of a native artist, we may form some idea of its character from the Egyptian portraits, dating from the Roman epoch, which are now in the Louvre. Doubtless the portrait of Amasis was very different in style from these productions of the decadence; but it is probable that, like them, it was painted upon a cedar panel.
We have no reason to believe that the Egyptians ever succeeded in crossing the line which separates illumination from painting. The convention which saw only single flat tones on every surface being once adopted, it was sometimes pushed to extraordinary lengths. Not content with ignoring the varieties of tone and tint which nature everywhere presents, the Egyptian artists sometimes adopted arbitrary hues which did not, even faintly, recall the actual colours of the objects upon which they were used. As a rule they represented the female skin as a light-yellow, and the male as a reddish-brown. This distinction may be understood. Besides its convenience as indicative of sex to a distant observer, it answers to a difference which social habits have established in every civilized society. More completely covered than men and less in the open air, the women, at least those of the upper classes, are less exposed to the effects of sun and wind than men. Their skins are usually fairer. In northern climates they are whiter, in southern less brown. We are surprised therefore to find that in the small temple at Ipsamboul the carnations of male and female, whether they be kings and queens or gods and goddesses, are all alike of a vivid yellow, not far removed from chrome.[339] Those divinities who have the limbs and features of man, such as Amen, Osiris, Isis, and Nephthys, should, we might think, be subject to the same rule as the images of men and women, and in most cases it is so. But, on the other hand, the painter often endows them with skins of the most fanciful and arbitrary hue. At Ipsamboul there is an Amen with a blue skin,[340] and, again, an Amen and an Osiris which are both green.[341] At Philæ we find numerous examples of the same singularity.[342] At Kalabché, in Nubia, there are royal figures coloured in the same fashion.[343]
Exceptional though they may be, these curious representations help us to understand the Egyptian method of looking at colour. They did not employ it like the modern painter, in order to add to the illusion; they used it decoratively, partly to satisfy that innate love for polychromy which we have explained by the intensity of a southern sun, partly to give relief to their figures, which would stand out more boldly from the white ground when brilliant with colour than when they had to depend solely upon their slight relief. In the interior of the figure colour was used to distinguish the flesh from the draperies, and to indicate those enrichments in the latter which made up the elegance of the Egyptian costume. A good example of this way of using colour is seen in the tomb of Amenophis III., which contains the portrait of Queen Taia reproduced in our Fig. 264.[344]
We find, too, that in pictures in which people of different races are brought together, the artist employs different tones to mark their varied hues. In a tomb at Abd-el-Gournah, in which the construction of a building is represented, the workmen, who are doubtless slaves or prisoners of war, have not all skins of one colour; some are light yellow, some light red, while others are reddish-brown. We are led to believe that this is not merely the result of caprice on the part of the painter, by the fact that the men with the light yellow skin seem to have more hair on their chests and chins than the others. They come, no doubt, from northern latitudes, whose inhabitants are more hairy than the southerners.[345] The negroes are made absolutely black,[346] the Ethiopians very dark brown.[347]
But although the Egyptian painter made no attempt to imitate the hues of nature in their infinite variety, we find a curious effort in certain Theban paintings to reproduce one of those modifications of local tone which were to attract so many artists of later times. The flesh tints are brown where they are uncovered, and light yellow where they are veiled; the painter thus attempting to show the warm skin shining through the semi-transparence of fine linen.[348]
This is, however, but an isolated attempt, and it does not affect the truth of our description of Egyptian painting, and of its conventional methods of using colour. The observations we have made apply equally justly to coloured bas-reliefs and to paintings properly speaking. The latter are only found in the tombs. In the temples the figures which compose the decoration are always engraved upon the walls in some fashion before they are touched with colour, and the office of the painter was restricted to filling in the prepared outlines with colour. It is the same, as a rule, with the steles; but a few exist upon which the painter has had the field to himself. The papyri, too, were illustrated by the artist in colour. Those elaborate examples of the Ritual of the Dead, which come from the tombs of princes and of rich subjects, are full of carefully executed vignettes (Figs. 97 and 184, Vol. I.).
It is easy to understand why the painter reserved himself for the tomb. The pictures upon the external walls of the temples and upon the pylons were seen in the full glare of a southern sun; so too, at least for a part of the day, were those upon the walls of the courtyards, and upon the shafts of their surrounding columns. Even in the interior many of the decorations would receive direct sunlight from the claustra of the attic, others would be subject to friction from the hands and garments of visitors. Painting by itself would be unfitted for such situations. It would either have its effect destroyed by the direct light, or its colours dulled and damaged by constant touches. Figures carved in the substance of the walls would have a very different duration. When their colours paled with time, a few strokes of the brush would be sufficient to renew their youth, and the combination of colour with relief would give a much more telling result than could be obtained by the use of the latter alone.
Fig. 264.—Portrait of Queen Taia. From Prisse.
With the tomb it was very different. In its case neither violent changes of temperature, nor friction, nor the rays of a dazzling sun were to be feared. Its doors were to be ever closed, and the scenes which were entrusted to its walls were to have no spectator but the dead man and his protecting Osiris. To carry out the whole work with the brush was quicker than to associate that instrument with the chisel, and we need therefore feel no surprise that many tombs were so decorated.
These paintings are in no way inferior to the sculptural works of the same period; the outlines of both must, in fact, have been traced by the same hands. The wielders of the chisel and brush must have been nothing more than journeymen or artisans; the true artist was he who traced upon the wall the outline which had afterwards to be filled in either in relief or in colour.
We should have liked to have reproduced the best of these paintings with all their richness and variety of tint, but we had no original studies of which we could make use, and, as in the painted architecture, we saw no great advantages to be gained by copying the plates of Champollion, of Lepsius, or of Prisse. The processes which they were compelled to employ have in many cases visibly affected the fidelity of their transcriptions. We have therefore felt ourselves compelled, much to our disappointment, to trust almost entirely to black and white. We have, however, been careful to preserve the relative values of the different tones. Those who have seen Egyptian paintings in the original, or even in the copies which hang upon the staircase of the Egyptian museum in the Louvre, will be able to restore their true colours to our engravings without difficulty; the flesh tints, light or dark according to circumstances, the blackness of the hair, the whiteness of linen cloth and of the more brilliant colours, the reds and blues which adorn certain parts of the draperies and certain details of furniture and jewellery, may all be easily divined.
Our plates, though less numerous than we could have wished, will help the reader to restore the absent colour. Plate II., in the first volume, gives a good idea of the scale of tints used in the painted bas-reliefs of the temples; we have every reason to believe it accurate.[349] The plate which faces page 334 is a faithful reproduction of a fragment in the Louvre. It comes from a Theban tomb, and shows the elegance and refinement of the contours which the painter had to fill up. The colour has faded, but the most interesting point in all these pictures is the outline, in which alone real artistic talent and inventive power are displayed. Finally, our Plates III. and IV., drawn and coloured from notes and sketches made upon the spot by M. Bourgoin, represent the polychromatic decoration of the Ancient Empire as it was left by those who decorated the tomb of Ptah-hotep. In this case at least we know that we possess the true value of the tones brought together by the artist, for the mastaba in question is one of those which the desert sands have most completely preserved.
§ 2. The Figure.
In the mastabas colours are applied to figures in relief. It is not till we reach the first Theban Empire, in the tombs at Beni-Hassan, that we find real paintings in which the brush alone has been used.