To write such a book upon any art as should be eminently useful to the professors of that art, as instructing them in methods whereby they may improve their practice, and avoid the difficulties they have to encounter, or gracefully evade them, would require the hand of a consummate artist, who, to great practice, should join large knowledge of his subject, and a minute acquaintance with the materials upon whose nature more of practical success depends, than enthusiasts in art are willing to own. Besides, he should possess sufficient learning to communicate the experience of past ages, for the improvement of this; and a good taste and acquaintance with general literature, to adorn his subject with the graces that all arts may borrow from each other, becoming always richer in proportion as they draw from their common treasury, Nature.

To write a work of just criticism, upon a peculiar art, the author should no less be a professor, whose practice might exemplify his criticism, or at any rate might enable him justly to appreciate the merits and defects of the peculiar works which he should choose as subjects on which to found his criticisms.

The lectures of Sir Joshua Reynolds made art popular in this country, less because they contained excellent precepts and well-chosen examples, than because, like Johnson’s criticism in the Lives of the Poets, they laid open the general principles applicable to all the arts. Poetry and music, painting and sculpture, architecture and landscape-gardening, may equally profit by them, the passages peculiarly appropriated to painters being far from the most numerous, though such as none but a painter could have written.

Fuseli appears to be more exclusively a critic in his own art. He had prodigious practice in his own wild walk, wherein, however, even he often mistook the glare of caprice for the light of genius. He had great learning, the effect of which he injured by affectation and quaintness, yet there are exquisite passages in his lectures, which will always be read with profit and delight both by artists and lovers of art.

The practical lectures delivered or published by other authors, some living, and some whose loss we have to lament, have not been popular, chiefly because they were most properly composed for the use of artists. And when we consider that they have been for the most part the works of men whose lives were passed in the most laborious department of a Profession that demands constant application, namely portrait painting, it is surprising how much they did in those hours which nature might have claimed as due to rest and relaxation. But such is the advantage possessed by a professor, when writing on the art be practises and understands.

I am aware that a certain class of connoisseurs, amateurs, or enthusiasts have lately put forth, perhaps I should say revived, the strange opinion that a practical artist is of all men the least fit to judge of art, and that it belongs to them, that is the connoisseurs only, to judge of his work. I believe this notion to have lurked in secret in the bosom of many an amateur for centuries back; but it required the fostering hand of German enthusiasm to publish it, as an axiom, to the world; and to write books upon the absurd notion, that those who know nothing practically of a subject, are the best judges and instructors concerning it.

Apelles had different notions; for while he bade the shoemaker stick to his last, he took his advice about the sandals of his Venus.

In truth, to use the words of the wisest of modern men, “the labours of speculative men, in active matters, seem to men of experience, little better than Phormio’s discourses of war; which seemed to Hannibal as dreams and dotage[1].”

If mere lovers of art will, nevertheless, devote their thoughts and pens to her enchanting service, I think they may do an acceptable office, even to painters themselves, by collecting what is, or has been known of her progress, following up her history from the first faint traces of her path among savage tribes, to her majestic footsteps in the flourishing states of Greece; nor losing sight of her entirely in her sad hours of degradation under Imperial Rome, and finally watching over her gentle though slow revival under the brilliant sun of Italy.

There is a kind of history of art which has been successfully cultivated: I mean that which addresses itself directly to the eye by a chronological display of the remaining works of art in the great publications of Monfaucon, Dagincourt, Micali, and the various archæological works of different societies[2]. But these are books of such price as must always render them difficult of access; and, unfortunately, the descriptions attached to the prints seldom admit of separation; and are, in general, written too dully to interest, or so much in the spirit of controversy as to render them disagreeable.

Such history can never become popular. There remains, however, open, an unpretending path, yet untrodden, by which those who love art may be led sufficiently near her temple to enjoy her beauties, understand her virtues, and be blessed by her happy influence, without encroaching on the province of her professed servants, or engaging in combat with her false or mistaken friends, or avowed enemies.

Tis this path that I would pursue, and take along with me those of my sex and country who love the good and the beautiful, and who likewise love to look up through them, to the fountain of all goodness, and to the Author of all beauty.

A great deal of time and much temper have been wasted, in disputes concerning the native country of the arts. China, Upper India, and Egypt, have been perhaps the favourites of the learned, though there have not been wanting champions for the claims of Western Asia, and even Greece.

But, if we could trace all the arts, whether springing from the primary wants, or the mere desires and wishes of man, to one original inventor, we should not be much the forwarder. As mankind increased, and formed separate nations, these arts would naturally and necessarily vary, in order to accommodate themselves to climates and circumstances. And we are as little likely to fix, with any thing like certainty, on the native country of painting or sculpture, as to discover that of the various kinds of grain, which in all ages have formed the principal food of civilized men. The discovery of the great Western World, long enough after the art of printing, to secure whatever memorials might be written concerning the state of its inhabitants, opened to us a monument of the early condition of all mankind, a thousand times more instructive than pillars of marble or of brass.

The Spaniards found in Florida one species of grain, cultivated and used for bread, in the same way, and in as much ignorance of its origin, as wheat in the Old World: and in many provinces, a substitute for the finer grains was used, requiring infinitely more ingenuity in its preparation, and of the origin of which the natives knew so little, as to look upon it as the gift of a benevolent enchanter[3]. In Mexico and Peru they found many arts considerably advanced. The smelting, casting, embossing, engraving of metals; the making of very fine pottery; the chiselling of the hardest stones and marbles. There, too, was painting practised, not as a mere luxury, but as a matter of prime necessity. For the nations were still so young as not to have discovered alphabetical writing; therefore, painting, mixed with a variety of conventional signs, almost amounting to hieroglyphic characters, was used, to record the history of the nations, the transactions of the priests and merchants, and the decisions of the laws[4].

Since that great first discovery, many and various tribes have been gradually revealed to us, none so savage as not to have discovered some longing after arts, beyond those absolutely necessary to existence. The cloth of the Sandwich Islander was stamped with mimic leaves and branches. The clubs, darts, and hatchets of the New Zealanders were covered with flowers and foliage; and not unfrequently we find on them an attempt at the human form.

The fences of the Morais presented, on many of the poles, a human head, grossly cut indeed, but still bearing the impress of man’s imitative genius.

Instances of this sort might be multiplied; but for the present I have named enough for my purpose, which is, to prove that it is unnecessary to trace the arts from country to country, or from house to house, to give them, as it were, a formal genealogy; but that we may expect to find that, circumstances being tolerably alike, the fine arts will spring up in all nations as they advance in civilization.

The progress of art is a separate question, and must have been influenced by many circumstances not naturally connected with it. Hence we see it in one nation beginning in splendour and advancing rapidly for a time; when suddenly it is stopped as by an enchanter’s wand: the handicraft may improve, but the form, character, and spirit, remain for ever fixed. In another, on the contrary, it advances, firm and free: every age improves it: and its career is only cut short when the nation itself sinks before a foreign conqueror!

Differently again, but still influenced by the circumstances of society, we have beheld the arts almost touching upon perfection and then withering, by slow and sickly decay, till all that ennobled them has disappeared, and they seem fitted for nothing but to adorn the ephemeral trophies of fashion or caprice.

Having thus so far cleared the ground, I will endeavour to collect the scattered notices concerning art, in the most ancient times, and among the most anciently civilized nations; and so prepare the way for more connected details, when we reach the period of common history.

The book of Genesis names one of the great grandsons of Cain, as the first who wrought and graved on metal, and another as the inventor of musical instruments,—a proof that the arts were cultivated in very early stages of civilization[5].

Again, within four centuries after the flood, we find that men had made images of wood, and stone, and metal, to worship. They had not only built them cities, but they had tasted of the barbarous civilities of war; they had erected trophies; poets had extolled the exploits of heroes; and sculptors had already fashioned their images, to adore. Constant tradition names Terah, the father of Abraham, as a maker of images; and that the worship of them continued in his family for nearly two hundred years, notwithstanding the call and conversion of Abraham, is proved by Rachel’s theft of the images of Laban, when she left her father’s house to accompany her husband to the land of Canaan.

But, if we may believe Greek and Egyptian tradition, more than a century before the call of Abraham, a colony had been planted at Sicyon, by an Egyptian leader, Ægialeus,[6] who brought with him the knowledge of sculpture and painting, and founded the earliest and purest school of Greek art.

Another civilized colony, from Egypt, soon settled in Greece. Inachus founded the city of Argos, while Abraham was still an idolater, in Ur.

At this period, Egypt and Chaldea both seem to have sent out colonies on every side, and history and tradition alike point to this period also, as that of the invention of alphabetical writing: or, at any rate, its establishment in a great part of the then civilized world. The claims of the Egyptian Memnon and the Phœnician Cadmus to the invention, appear to be equally and entirely without foundation; and Pliny’s notion that it had existed from the beginning, in Chaldea and the adjacent countries, is supported, by a very remarkable passage in the book of Joshua[7].

On the victorious march of the Israelites, under Joshua himself, to Palestine, we find he took Debir; i.e. the place of an oracle or wise discourse. The name of the town was before Kirjath Sepher, or city of books or of letters; therefore books and letters were ancient, in that country, in Joshua’s time.[8] That pictures and sculpture were so likewise, I infer from the command given in Numbers, xxxiii. 52, to destroy the pictures and molten images of the natives of Palestine.

If any reliance is to be placed on the annals of China and of India, civilization and its attendant arts were at least as early with them as with Egypt and Chaldea, each claiming the priority, and each pretending to have been the teacher of the rest of the world, on equally plausible grounds.

There is no doubt of the antiquity of Indian civilization. The ancient Greek writers talk of the Indian philosophers, as belonging to a nation highly polished, before a grain of corn had been sown in Greece; and the pretensions of China are supported by the Indians themselves.

I have said thus much of the general civilization of these nations, because I could not separate it from the cultivation of the arts. I will now keep closer to my subject, reserving, however, the liberty of digressing wherever I see occasion, or, in other words, whenever it suits my humour.

As I take it, the Chinese remain, more nearly than any other people, in the state in which they were two or three thousand years ago, and are, for their age, the veriest babes that inhabit the earth. I will begin with them, and see what their proficiency in art has ever amounted to.

It is plain from their written signs, for alphabet they have none: that in early times, they, like the Mexicans, exerted their powers of imitation to represent in painting, events, the memory of which they wished to preserve. On dissecting the hundred and seventeen elementary characters, whose endless combinations represent their language, it is not difficult to trace the rude forms of men, birds, quadrupeds, fish, houses, trees, hills, and so forth; and in the very oldest writings, before the circular forms were rejected altogether, these shapes were still more distinct[9].

We may naturally expect that, as long as painting is thus used, convenience alone would require the once admitted forms and colours to be invariable, and that precautions would be taken against innovation, even for improvement, lest the painted pages should become unintelligible. But the Chinese had advanced far beyond that. Their characters approach, even more nearly than hieroglyphics, to alphabetical writing, and yet their art remained stationary and at a very low point. It is very difficult to account for this among so ingenious a people. It was not that the Tartar conquest, by any direct influence, lessened their civilization or stopped their progress. We have undeniable witnesses to the contrary, in the Chinese histories, as interpreted by the missionaries and other learned orientalists; and, what is still more curious and satisfactory, in the writings of Marco Paulo, who accompanied the Tartar conqueror on his expedition.

The religion of the Chinese, as Bhuddhists, is assuredly not calculated to call forth the genius of painting. The insipid Goorus do not, like the gods of the Hindoo or Greek mythologies, present subjects for fancy to play with; and the statues of Bhud, while they have all the stiffness, have none of the grandeur of the Egyptian gods.

Perhaps, as the Chinese have always been a commercial nation, they contented themselves with cultivating the art of painting, just so far as to decorate their exquisite porcelain and lacquered ware for the market, and sought after nothing more.

They had certainly attained to great manual dexterity, and the power of copying servilely whatever inanimate subjects were before them; and they had discovered the method of extracting colours from metallic substances, capable of bearing the furnace, as well as those of more obvious use, in the chalks and earths of their country: besides some of the finest varnishes in existence. We ought not to marvel that they did not attain, in their painting, to common, much less ideal beauty, when we reflect on the general character of form, in their own nation or their Tartar conquerors, which is very far below that of the Indians and their western neighbours. And we have, perhaps, no right to expect better human shapes than that of the portly mandarin and his crimp-footed lady, upon their plates and dishes. But their animals, whether painted, modelled in clay, or cast in metal, are little less distorted than their men: and as to perspective, linear, or aërial, they seem to have no sense of either[10]. In flowers and birds, their pencilling is delicate, and often true to admiration; but, even in these objects, except in treatises on botany or ornithology, their peculiar taste breaks out in monstrous combinations of leaves and flowers, that never grew in the same soil; and of beaks and wings, that were never hatched in the same nest.

The Japanese appear to have carried many arts to much greater perfection than the Chinese; and even in painting, the very old Japan figures approach nearer in style to beauty and a certain sort of greatness.

But the reading of one Chinese novel or drama, such, for instance, as the “Fortunate Alliance,” or “The Adventures of the Fair Shuey Ping Sing, and the Chalk Ring,” or “Le Cercle de Craie,” must satisfy us that, whatever progress that nation may have made in science, or whatever sagacity it may have displayed in internal government or in commerce, a true taste for the liberal arts has never ennobled its other pursuits, or charmed the leisure of its philosophers and statesmen.

I do not mean to say that they neither look at pictures nor listen to music: but those pictures and that music differ so widely in taste and quality from what the greater number of civilized nations are agreed in admiring, that I feel justified in considering them as insensible to that standard of taste which all the rest of the world acknowledges.

Was India then the mother of the arts? and, among her many claims to distinction can she, with justice, advance that of having instructed Egypt and anticipated the splendours of Babylon?

It might be expected that the remaining works of art, in that most ancient nation, might decide the question. But far from it. Nor does history or tradition throw any trust-worthy light on the subject.

The most ancient monuments of Egypt bear a certain resemblance to some of those of India, and what we know of the religion of both countries indicates, that, in some most remote period, their mysteries and rites had a close resemblance. Yet, on some material points, such as their funeral ceremonies, the difference seems to have been so decided that we are forced to conclude that they were of different sects, emanating, possibly, from a common source.

It is curious, that the figures of Bhud, whether on the continent of India, or the island of Ceylon, or in China, should present the form, and curled woolly hair of a Southern African. But the Bhuddhists of India do not appear to have produced better works, in sculpture, than those of China. The Brahmins, on the contrary, have left, besides magnificent architectural monuments, in their caverns, in which they are rivalled by the Bhuddhists, pieces of sculpture, of a very different character from theirs, where there is occasionally grandeur, and, not unfrequently, freedom and grace. No one, who has seen the colossal head of the Trimurti, in Elephanta, can deny the grandeur, almost the sublimity, of that strange work; and the compartments of the same temple-cavern are examples of a gracious feeling of nature. The sculptured rock, at Mavellipoor, or Mahabalipoor, called the Tapas, or Penance of Arjoon, is a further example of freedom and taste; and the figures of the elephants, and other animals, attendant on the holy penitent, are designed with the greatest truth. The deformities, almost constant in Egypt, of placing the heads of animals on men’s shoulders, because the qualities of those animals were figurative of the attributes of the deities, are added to by the Hindoos, who, regarding the human hand as the symbol of power, have accordingly multiplied the hands of the gods.

I shewed the late Mr. Flaxman some drawings of the sculptured rocks of Mahabalipoor: he was struck with the freedom and expression of several of the figures, in which there was an evident attempt to imitate nature, and especially he was pleased with the expression of the courtiers of Bali, in the design of the Vamuna Avater.

I must observe that at Mavellipoor, within a circuit of less than two miles, there are, besides the ruins of several large temples, built of hewn stone, eight Monothelite temples: small[11], but all differing in form, richly and capriciously ornamented; several caverns, on the walls of which there are many mythological subjects carved in high relief, some of the figures being seven feet high; and the sculptured rock of Arjoon, which I have already mentioned.

Yet, in most of these works, the execution is coarse, as if the material had been too stubborn for the tools of the workman. I am told that this defect does not exist in some other of the cavern temples of India, but it runs through all that I have seen.

Of the painting of the Hindoos, no specimen of anything like ancient times has been preserved[12]; though, from their undoubtedly ancient poems and plays, it is certain that they did paint, and that their pictures were not only single portraits, but compositions, both of what we call history and familiar life[13].

Who, indeed, can read Sir William Jones’s pleasant abridgement of the Hindoo mythology, his translation of Sacontala, or the hymn to Camdeo, and not perceive that the Indians wanted neither imagination, nor subjects to exercise it upon, in their religion and poetry?

But their florid religion, and exaggerated songs, were of later date, in all probability, than that grave and philosophical faith which gave the Brahmins their reputation in Greece and Egypt; and, perhaps, their more natural pieces of sculpture and their pictures belong to that later time rather than to the age of the gymnosophists; or if the Indian arts furnished examples to Egypt or Chaldea, we must seek those examples in the hewn rocks, which represent figures nearly as large as the Egyptian Memnon, with their hands attached to their sides, and their feet planted together, and of which some few still exist, within the Peninsula, and on the Indian side of the borders of Tartary[14].

What do we know of the arts of Chaldea, in very early times[15]? Babylon and Nineveh have, for thousands of years, been buried in utter ruin; and if here and there a bauble, such as the signet of a Satrap, or the breast-pin of a lady, be picked up, however delicately the cornelian or the onyx may be chiselled, the forms are stiff and angular, and nothing displays the freedom and grace that render art valuable. The great sculptured rocks met with in various parts of modern Persia, have everywhere the same character. But, upon the whole however, there is a graver and more majestic air than in the monuments of India, and a much greater dexterity of hand is displayed in the workmanship, but there is less nature in the design.

As to painting, in that country, there are neither relics nor memorials, of earlier date than our æra[16].

It is with reverence, not unmixed with awe, that I approach the subject of Egyptian art: and here, as in India and the intermediate countries, I must consider its sculpture as the only satisfactory monument. I am aware that coloured subjects, by courtesy called pictures, have been discovered on the walls of tombs and caverns, by persons well qualified to examine and pronounce, as antiquaries, on their meaning and their merit.

But they are, in composition, entirely sculpturesque; and many of them are, in fact, coloured basso-relievos.

Belzoni told me he had seen, in Egypt, figures in relief wrought in stucco on the walls of some of the catacombs, which were coloured in simple unbroken colours. To these he ascribed a marvellous effect, and said, they were the grandest pictures he had seen. Such also, I remember, was the language used by my enthusiastic friend Kestner, when, in 1827, he described to me the tombs of Egyptian character, opened the year before at Tarquinii, in the country of the ancient Etruscans.

I can imagine readily that in the chambers of the dead, the plain form shadowed out in a simple colour, and lighted by the glare of torches, may have had an awful and ghostly character; and if these figures were of the size of life, or larger, and further aided by the varying tints afforded by a low relief, as the torches glared upon them, a describer could hardly be charged with exaggeration, whatever effects he might impute to them.

Still these are not pictures, though the artists approached nearly to picturesque design in many of the chiselled figures on the walls of the temples and tombs of Thebes, where the attacking and defending towns, the triumphs of a victorious king, the punishment of rebels, and other historical facts, are rendered with considerable spirit, and convey a notion that their authors might have become painters, had they not been restrained by custom from change or progress. These could not, however, be the beginnings of art. They mark already a very advanced state of society, since such great works of ornament could be required and executed; and they, it seems, were ancient when Herodotus visited Egypt 450 years before our era[17].

But we have more authentic documents in favour of the antiquity of the arts in Egypt, even than those afforded by the father of Greek history. Fifteen centuries before Herodotus travelled into Egypt, Abraham had been entertained there by a powerful king, who gave him gifts, such as only the head of a people already conversant with many arts could bestow. The whole history of Joseph’s life in Egypt[18] bears witness to the progress already made there in civility and the arts of polished life.

Could we read the inscription freely, which covers the obelisk of Mataryah, the only remains of the stately Heliopolis, the On of Scripture, perhaps we might find some record of that high priest who gave his daughter in marriage to the Hebrew governor.

Both sacred[19] and profane history[20] fix upon the two centuries between 1600 and 1400 before Christ, as the period when a prodigious movement took place in Egypt, and when great works were undertaken by the kings, and important colonies led forth into the western parts of Asia, and into Greece.

I have already mentioned the foundation of Argos and Sicyon, said to have taken place nearly 600 years before the period of which I am now speaking. They were, therefore, flourishing states when Cecrops[21], the Egyptian, taught the people of Attica to sow corn, instead of trusting to the precarious chances of the seasons in bringing forth wild fruits, or the still more uncertain product of the chase; and chose for the patroness of his new colony the goddess to whom his native city Saïs was consecrated; Minerva or Bubastis. The rich country of Asia Minor had not been more backward than Egypt in the earlier times; nor afterwards less forward than Greece in receiving colonies. In the time of Abraham, Damascus was a market, where slaves[22] were sold; and forty years after Cecrops had founded Athens, Scamander settled a colony in Troy.

Scarcely a hundred years[23] after the Egyptians had carried their arts and their religion into Attica, we find the first Panathenaic procession mentioned, when the whole people of Athens solemnly dedicated themselves to the service of the goddess Athena or Minerva, and to that of their country, and bore before them to her temple her banner, or veil, formed of fine linen, and embroidered with subjects relative to her history or her attributes.

The fine arts were therefore known in Attica at this early time; for whether the peplos or veil were wrought in Attica, or imported from Saïs, those who followed the banner could not be blind to the designs and colours that adorned it. It was about this time that Cadmus brought from the Eastern countries to Greece the knowledge of alphabetical writing; at this time, when Minos gave his laws to Crete; while Danaus, believed to be an Egyptian prince, reigned at Argos, and Erichthonius in Athens; that Rameses was Phrah, or king of, at least, Northern Egypt. He had caused the descendants of Abraham to build for him the treasure cities of Rameses and Pithom[24]; and in his reign Moses led forth the Israelites, to escape from his tyranny, into the land promised to their forefathers.

Before I say anything concerning the arts of Egypt alone, or the changes they underwent in different soils, and under different circumstances, I must point out the only minute account we have, that can be relied upon, of any peculiar works executed by any of the various tribes who at that time separated themselves from their nursing mother. I mean the ark of the covenant, fashioned by the direction of Moses in the wilderness, and the contemporary golden calf and brazen serpent.

And here we have, as far as I know, the names of the two most ancient artists recorded: Aholiab and Bezaleel, whom the Scripture calls the wise in heart; but they had many assistants, and it appears that Aaron himself was a skilful workman.

The arts required for the making of the ark and the erection of the tabernacle were the preparing and dying of skins; the weaving of fine linen; the fine dyes, blue, scarlet, red, and purple; designing for the embroiderers[25], who wrought the pomegranates, the flowers, and the leaves; every variety of carving in wood; casting and chiselling of metals; and, finally, the engraving on precious stones, and setting them according to the jewellers’ art.

When, to quiet the impatient Israelites, Aaron consented to make a god for them, such as they had been used to in Egypt, he caused them to bring their jewels of gold to him for the purpose; and, after he had cast or made a molten image, he finished it with the graver[26]. Now this is the process of casting figures in metal to this very day.

Here, then, we have the Jews designing, making moulds, casting metals, and finishing with the graver. They were, therefore, not all mere brick-makers in Egypt; but some of them, like Moses and Aaron, had been instructed in the learning, or at least the arts, of the Egyptians. Again, for the brass and gold ornaments of the tabernacle and the ark, Bezaleel made the cherubim[27] on the mercy seat of beaten gold; that is, their faces and wings were embossed and chiselled. So likewise was the great candlestick, with its flowers and its almonds, its leaves and its buds.

The whole putting together of the tent of the tabernacle is most ingenious, and denotes an acquaintance with great magnificence in architecture and in furniture. The breastplate was composed of twelve precious stones, from diamond the hardest, down to the most easily wrought, cornelian; yet each was engraved after the manner of a signet, with the name of one of the tribes, and set in its own peculiar setting.

Such are the particulars we learn on undoubted authority of the arts at that early period, as practised in Egypt for convenience and ornament.

But Egypt had another use for the arts. She applied them mainly to the service of religion.

All nations, however rude, evince a desire to record their own actions and those of their fathers. Poets, bards, senachies, scalds, or by whatever name the same class of men may be called, are, like the traditionary tale-tellers of the American Indians, the earliest of historians. Their art, which is that of so placing words as to form sentences, whether distinguished by rhyme or by only a peculiar rhythm, more easily and pleasantly remembered than the same words would be in the ordinary arrangement of speech, may be practised by the warrior or the huntsman, without interfering with his other avocations. It is, therefore, peculiarly fitted for rude tribes, who cannot afford that any individual should give himself up exclusively to an inactive profession.

The rhapsodies of the bards, however, may be forgotten, and will probably be so in a few generations;[28] and, if a tribe migrate so as to settle where other tongues are spoken, the songs are sung in the ears of the deaf, and the beginnings of history are swept wholly away.

How, then, shall the memory of the past be preserved? the propensity of man to imitation will lead him to attempt to form a likeness of any great benefactor to the community. The simple stone set up for a memorial will soon be cut into a rude statue. The face of a rock will admit of carving figures enough to represent an event of importance; or the outlines may be scratched upon a board, and the use of colour, which abounds everywhere, is an easy step towards the beginning of painting. Such, we have positive proof, it was in Mexico; such, we may reasonably presume, it must have been in Egypt.

But the heroes and benefactors of a lively and enthusiastic people soon came to be looked upon as something divine. He, who first in the sight of his tribe, scattered seed upon the earth, and, trusting to the certain return of the season, taught how to gather in the harvest and convert the grain into bread, must have stood in the light of a Creator. When accident had attracted observation to the fatty nature of the olive, he who applied oil to the feeding of a lamp would be celebrated as a benefactor. The tamer of the bull, who brought kine to labour for men, and from their milk produced such variety of delicious food, merited still higher gratitude; and those who converted rude dross and shapeless ore into instruments of agriculture, mechanical tools, weapons offensive and defensive, almost deserved the divine honours paid to them.

It is neither my business nor my inclination to discuss the origin or principles of the mythology of any country, farther than as it affected the arts.

The pictures and statues of the benefactors, or, as they soon began to be called, of the gods, were intended to be lasting memorials of their forms and acts. They were to speak a language independent of the tongue. Hence it became absolutely necessary, that their representative type should remain for ever fixed. So that to whatever excellence the mechanic might attain, or whatever improvement the progress of science might enable the artist to make, all change was forbidden; and though the labour and finish became exquisite, it would have been sacrilege to alter the form. Hence, while the statues of other nations not under these restrictions, assumed the freedom and grace of nature, Egypt saw her Osiris and Isis retaining their rigid and unnatural characters, notwithstanding the sublime style in which they were conceived.

The basso-relievos, intaglios, and painted stuccoes of the temples and catacombs, present greater varieties of action and design; but even in them, the human figure is still monotonous in character.

But whole statues and pictures engraved on rocks and walls of granite and freestone, are inconvenient registers. Hence one well known form was soon allowed to stand as the sign of a subject or action; part of that figure might, in time, be substituted for the whole.

The forms of animals whose qualities were supposed to bear relation to those of man, were admitted to represent abstract ideas; as, for instance, in India, the elephant’s head adorned the shoulders of the god of wisdom, and in Egypt, the watchfulness of the cat procured her the honour of lending a mask sometimes to the greatest of the goddesses. Insects whose appearance was constant at particular seasons, became the types of those seasons, or of the heavenly bodies which regulate them; so by a natural process, a scheme of hieroglyphic representation, if we must not say writing, was framed, which long continued in use among the governing priests of Egypt to preserve the annals of the country.

Their hieroglyphics were themselves too cumbrous for constant use, and it appears certain from ancient tradition and modern discovery, that they produced a variety of steps approaching more or less to alphabetical writing; and in all probability the learned priests who could not be ignorant of the existence of such writing, preferred their own mysterious and obscure characters for the sake of that power which unusual and exclusive knowledge always confers.

The effect that the use of hieroglyphic painting, whether more or less near to writing, had upon the art of painting itself was most disastrous. Those who were permitted to paint at all, were bound to make no improvement. The art was jealously kept for the adornment of hideous mummy cases[29] and sepulchral chambers, where the nearest approaches to what is properly painting were a sort of portraits, drawn upon the inner coffins, which were composed of folds of linen prepared with a chalk ground, or basso-relievos either coloured themselves, or imitated in flat colours upon the walls. The wood upon which the commoner coffin-painting was executed appears to have been sycamore; it was prepared with fine lime, mixed with some kind of gum or size for the colourer. The pigments were ochres for the most part; but the blues and greens appear to have been prepared from copper. The black was lamp-black, and the white a very fine lime[30]. These colours when applied on wood, or cotton, or linen, were probably mixed with gums, probably gum arabic or the Sarcocolla, which the Egyptians used in preparing their mummies, and also for glue[31], and that gum probably formed part of the varnish found on the mummy cases. According to Mr. Wilkinson’s account, the pictures in the catacombs were executed either on the bare limestone wall, or on the sandstone prepared with fine lime. Whether the groups were to be painted or chiselled in intaglio or relief, they were outlined with red ochre, then corrected with black. The next step was the carving the intaglios or the reliefs, or modelling the stucco applications, after which, in some of the tombs, plain unbroken colour was applied. But even this approach to painting arose from the desire of distinguishing objects, as tribute of gold from tribute of silver, prisoners of white, tawny, or black nations, and so on. But nothing like a picture, as we understand the word, has ever been found; nothing displaying a knowledge of light and shadow, perspective either lineal or aërial, nothing which by means of colour and tint imitates nature: nor have we the name of any Egyptian painter in the annals of art.

Under some of the Ptolemys, artists from Greece visited the court of the Grecian kings; and doubtless the merchants of Alexandria may have been permitted to possess Greek pictures; but the Ptolemys became Egyptians, and adopted the hieroglyphic manner of recording their acts and lives; and until the Christian hermits plastered over the mystic figures of the Egyptian priests, that they might without pollution erect their simple altars within the shelter of the abandoned temples, no change appears to have taken place with regard to the practice of the arts in Egypt.

It was reserved for the followers of Mahomet, who abhorred statuary and painting, to introduce a gay and florid architecture among the severe palaces and tombs of the children of Misraim, to use their temples as quarries for building materials, and to burn their statues for lime[32].

Egypt, therefore, though once excelling in architecture and religious sculpture, knowing the use of colour, and conferring innumerable benefits on other countries in most of the arts of design, has never herself been the country of painting.

Extract of a Letter from Mr. Clift to Mrs. Callcott.

November 1835.

I have been present, and assisted in the opening of several mummies, in which, although there was a general resemblance in the manner, yet there were palpable differences too, arising probably from difference of person, time, and price; but in none of them was there any painting whatever on the inner linen wrappings: they appear to differ chiefly in the greater or less care taken according to the price; some being much more laboriously and carefully prepared than others.

Raspe may have been right in the particular to which you allude, of the inner bandages being painted, if he has not mistaken the inner coffin for bandaging: as Mr. Pettigrew in his late quarto volume on Mummies, has given a three-quarter face portrait, which I think he describes as having been found on the surface of the immediate wrappers of the body within the second coffin of a specimen in the British Museum, which I have not seen; and he has, or had, the head of a supposed female mummy, which had the features of a face and head-dress outlined upon the exterior wrapper of the body, but I have seen no other example.

It is not unusual, in the more expensively prepared mummies, to find the inside of the outer or wooden case ornamented with figures in outline; but I do not recollect any such that were coloured: the greatest labour appears to have been always bestowed on the second or internal coffin, or case which immediately contains the body.

The outer, or wooden case, which is generally believed to be made of sycamore-wood, is sometimes wrought out of the solid, that is, excavated; and sometimes composed of several pieces joined by dowels, or wooden pegs, instead of nails. I never saw an instance of iron or metal being employed. This outer case is also usually of considerable thickness, viz., from two to three or four or more inches, and generally coated thickly with distemper colour, on which is painted various emblematical devices in a very inferior manner; the mask or face sometimes gilded, sometimes red (male), sometimes yellow (female). I never observed any appearance of varnish having been employed on the colours of this outer case.

On wrenching open the upper and lower portions of this outer or wooden case, which are united by flat tenons received in sockets and fastened by pegs, and apparently glue in the joint, the second or inner case appears. This case has not any wood in its composition, except a small piece at the bottom, or foot-board, on which the feet of the mummy rest. This case is composed of at least ten or a dozen layers of linen of the same quality as that which envelopes the body; these laminæ are very firmly cemented together by a material apparently glue and lime, or plaster. This case is originally moulded on a rude mass or model of clay and straw, of the size and form of the swathed body intended to be afterwards contained in it, and when sufficiently dry to retain its form, the clay and straw are scraped or scooped out from the back part which is left open, or rather apparently cut open for that purpose, and then the body is introduced, and the edges of the aperture brought together and secured by a very simple and ingenious method of drum-like bracing, and the seam and lacing covered afterwards with a strip of cloth, glued or cemented, over them. This, with the foot-board, which is braced in or secured in the same manner, rendered the body as it were, hermetically sealed in its chrysalis case.

The painting on the exterior of the inner case is, I believe, the most laboured part of the process, and I have seen some which must have occupied many days, perhaps many weeks, in the very elaborate outlining and colouring in water-colour or distemper; and finally varnishing or fixing the subject of this hieroglyph or allegory. The ground of this painting is of very fine and pure white, resembling stucco. The parts that are drawn on, and apparently outlined with a pen and then coloured, are the only parts that are afterwards varnished:—the blank parts of the white ground remain unvarnished, except where the varnish-brush has occasionally slipped beyond the outline, and there the white has become yellow. This white ground may be disturbed by a wetted finger, which is not the case with the varnished parts. Their varnish must have been of excellent quality, as it retains its transparency and gloss in a most extraordinary degree; in some instances appearing as if executed only a few days. In one that was opened in Sir Benjamin Brodie’s new theatre in Kinnerton-street, Knightsbridge, during the last summer, some persons were so deceived as to believe the varnish to have been duly laid on and not yet dry; and really it might appear so to an inexperienced eye, without touching.

What the nature of the pigments used were, I have no adequate knowledge; they generally appear to be earthy or ochreous and opaque: yet their artists understood the art of representing transparent objects with them, for example:—in one which was opened about two years since at the College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, on which several figures were introduced, one of them had its limbs partly naked, partly covered by a thin transparent robe, and a third degree seen through a double and thicker part of the dress. The body of this mummy was enveloped in at least fifteen or twenty layers of linen filet, measuring I think about one hundred and thirty yards of handbreadth strips, torn the length way of the piece. The only entire piece from one end to the other of the warp, which I could preserve, measured eighteen feet, which, folded twice, made the length of their ordinary robe or dress (four feet six inches), of which we met with several examples. The outer general envelope or winding-sheet was in one piece, about seven feet in length, and nearly two yards wide, of excellently regular manufacture, with a very good and uniform selvage: there were also various pieces of about a yard long, and two yards or rather more in breadth, folded and placed under the hollow parts of the body, together with three or four halves (all of the left side) of robes or dresses, torn lengthwise, that had been much worn and darned, or strengthened with much ingenuity and neatness. These were folded, and laid behind or beneath the back as a palliasse. The name of this mummy, as deciphered by Mr. Wilkinson and Mr. Pettigrew, was “Horseisi, son of Naspihiniegori, incense bearing Priest in the Temple of Ammon at Thebes.” This inscription was repeated three or four times on the bandaging, between the body and the external surface of the wrappers, but there was no appearance of any painting whatever on them.