A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Volume II Part 16

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 172.--Sepa and Nesa, Louvre. Four feet eight inches high.]

The induction to which we have been led by the style of these figures is confirmed by an observation made during recent explorations in the necropolis of Memphis. The patch of green paint under the eyes has, as yet, only been found in statues from a certain peculiar cla.s.s of tombs at Gizeh and Sakkarah. These are chambers cut in the rock, in which the roofs are carved into imitations of timber ceilings of palm wood.

Some of the texts which have been found in them contain the name of a king whose chronological place has not yet been satisfactorily determined, but who seems to have been anterior to Snefrou. The figures upon which the adornment in question occurs would appear therefore to be contemporary with the oldest tombs in the neighbourhood of the pyramids.[174]

[174] The Boulak Museum also contains specimens of these figures. See _Notice_, Nos. 994 and 995.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RA-HOTEP AND NEFERT

BOULAK MUSEUM

Imp. Ch. Chardon]

Progress was rapid between the end of the third dynasty and that of the fourth. It was during the latter dynasty that the art of the Ancient Empire produced its masterpieces. Mariette attributes the two famous statues found in a tomb near the pyramid of Meidoum to the reign of Snefrou, the predecessor of Cheops. They are exhibited, under gla.s.s, in the Boulak Museum (Plate IX).[175]

[175] _Notice des princ.i.p.aux Monuments exposes a Boulak_, No.

973. These figures were discovered in January, 1872. They had a narrow escape of being destroyed by the pickaxes of the superst.i.tious fellaheen. Mariette fortunately arrived just in time to prevent the outrage. _Recueil de Travaux_, vol. i. p.

160.

"One of them represents Ra-hotep, a prince of the blood, who enjoyed the dignity of general of infantry, a very rare t.i.tle under the Ancient Empire; the other is a woman, Nefert, _the beauty_; her statue also informs us that she was related to the king. We do not know whether she was the wife or sister of Ra-hotep. The interest excited by the extreme beauty of these figures is increased by our certainty of their prodigious antiquity. In the mastaba where they were found everything is frankly archaic, everything is as old as the oldest of the tombs at Sakkarah, and those date from before the fourth dynasty.

A neighbouring tomb which, as is proved by the connection between their structures, dates from the same period as that of Ra-hotep, is that of a functionary attached to the person of Snefrou I. We may, therefore, fairly a.s.sign the two statues from Meidoum to the last reign of the third dynasty."[176]

[176] MARIETTE, _Voyage dans la Haute-egypte_, p. 47.

Each of these figures, with its chair-shaped seat, is carved from a single block of limestone about four feet high. The man is almost nude; his only dress is a ribbon about his neck, and white breeches like those to which we have already alluded. The woman is robed in the long chemise, open between the b.r.e.a.s.t.s, which we have seen upon Nesa.

Besides this a wide and richly designed necklace spreads over her chest. Upon her head she has a square-cut black wig, which, however, allows her natural hair to be visible in front. Over the wig she has a low flat cap with a decorated border. The carnations of the man are brownish red, those of the woman light yellow.

These statues betray an art much more advanced than that of Sepa and Nesa. The pose is much easier and more natural, but the right arm of Ra-hotep is stiff and held in a fas.h.i.+on which would soon cause cramp in a living man. The modelling of the body is free and true, though without much knowledge or subtlety. The b.r.e.a.s.t.s, arms, and legs of Nefert are skilfully suggested under her robe. But the care of the sculptor has been mainly given to the heads. By means of chisel and paint-brush he has given them an individuality which is not readily forgotten. The arched eyebrows surmount large well-opened eyes; the eyelids seem to be edged with heavy lashes and to stand out well from the eyeball. In the case of the latter the limestone has retained its primitive whiteness, giving a strong contrast with the pupil and iris (Fig. 173). The noses, especially that of Ra-hotep are fine and pointed; the thick but well-drawn lips seem about to speak. Her smooth cheeks and soft dark eyes, eyes which are still common among the women of the East, give Nefert a very attractive look. Her smiling and restful countenance is in strong contrast to that of Ra-hotep, which is full of life and animation not unmingled with a little hardness.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 173.--Ra-hotep. Drawn by Bourgoin.]

The longer we look at these figures the less ready are we to turn away from them. They are portraits, and portraits of marvellous sincerity.

If they could be gifted with life to-morrow, if we could encounter Ra-hotep and Nefert working under the sun of Egypt, the man semi-nude, sowing the grain or helping to make an embankment, his companion robed in the long blue chemise of the fellah women and balancing a pitcher upon her head, we should know them at once and salute them by name as old acquaintances. We find none of the marks of inexperience and archaism which are so conspicuous in the statues of Sepa and Nesa. A few later figures may seem to us more delicately modelled and more full of detail, but taking them all in all, we cannot look upon these statues as other than the creations of a mature art, of an art which was already in full command of its resources, and of a sculptor who had a well-marked personal and original style of his own.

We find the same qualities in another group of monuments ascribed by Mariette to no less remote a period.[177] The same eye for proportion, the same life-like expression, the same frankness and confidence of hand are to be found in those sculptured wooden panels of which the museum at Boulak possesses four fine examples. They were found at Sakkarah in the tomb of a personage called Hosi, where they were enframed in four blind doorways. They are on the average about 3 feet 10 inches high and 1 foot 8 inches wide. The drawings which we reproduce give a good idea of the peculiarities of style and execution by which they are distinguished (Figs. 174-176).[178]

[177] "According to all appearance these panels date from before the reign of Cheops." _Notices des princ.i.p.aux Monuments_, etc.

Nos. 987-92.

[178] There is a panel of the same kind in the Louvre (_Salle Historique_, No. 1 of Pierret's _Catalogue_), but it is neither so firm, nor in such good preservation as those at Cairo.

At first sight these carvings are a little embarra.s.sing to the eye accustomed to works in stone. The type of figure presented is less thickset. The body, instead of being muscular, is nervous and wiry.

The arms and legs are thin and long. In the head especially do we find unaccustomed features; the nose, instead of being round, is strongly aquiline; the lips, instead of being thick and fleshy, as in almost all other Egyptian heads, are thin and compressed. The profile is strongly marked and rather severe. The general type is Semitic rather than Egyptian. And yet the inscriptions which surround them prove that the originals were pure Egyptians of the highest cla.s.s. One of them, he who is represented standing in two different att.i.tudes, is Ra-hesi; the other, who is sitting before a table of offerings, bears the name of Pekh-hesi. The decipherable part of the inscription tells us that he was a scribe, highly placed, and in great favour with the king.

The tomb in which these panels were found was not built on the usual plan of the mastaba. Mariette alludes to certain peculiarities which are to be found in it, but he does not describe them in detail. The hieroglyphs are grouped in a peculiar fas.h.i.+on; many of them are of a very uncommon form. The arrangement of the objects borne in the left hand of Ra-hesi is quite unique. Struck by these singularities, Mariette a.s.serts that "the style of these panels is to Egyptian art what the style called archaic is to that of Greece."[179] This a.s.sertion seems to us inaccurate. Not that we mean to contest the validity of the reasons which Mariette gives for ascribing these panels to an epoch anterior to the great pyramids; but, whatever may be their age, it seems to be impossible, in view of the style in which they are executed, to call them archaic. They show no more archaism than the statues of Meidoum. The Egyptian artist never carved wood with greater decision or with more subtlety and finesse than are to be seen in these panels. As for the differences of execution which have been noticed between these figures and the stone statues of the same epoch, they may easily be explained by the change of material and by the Egyptian love for fidelity of imitation. Wood is not attacked in the same fas.h.i.+on as soft stone. Its const.i.tution does not lend itself to the ample and rounded forms of lapidary sculpture. It demands, especially when a low relief is used, a more delicate and subtle modelling. Again, these were portraits; all the Egyptians were not like one another, especially in that primitive Egypt in which perhaps various races had not yet been blended into a h.o.m.ogeneous population.

Among the contemporaries of Cheops, as in our day, there were fat people and thin people. Men who were tall and slender, and men who were short and thickset. Countenances varied both in features and expression.[180] In time art succeeded in evolving from all these diversities a type of Egyptian manhood and beauty. As the ages pa.s.sed away the influence of that type became more and more despotic. It became almost universal, except in those cases where there was a rigid obligation to reproduce the personal characteristics of an individual with fidelity. But at the end of the third dynasty that consummation was still far off. And we need feel no surprise that the higher we mount in the stream of Egyptian civilization the more particular are the concrete images which it offers to us, and the more striking the variation between one work of art and another.

[179] MARIETTE, _La Galerie de l'egypte Ancienne au Trocadero_, 1878, p. 122.

[180] Thus we find in a tomb which, according to Lepsius, dates from the fourth dynasty, certain thickset sculptured forms, which contrast strongly with figures taken from mastabas in the same neighbourhood, at Gizeh. The body is short, the legs heavy and ma.s.sive. LEPSIUS, _Denkmaeler_, part ii. pl. 9.

It must not be supposed, however, that the features which we have mentioned as peculiar in the cases of Ra-hesi and Pekh-hesi are not to be found elsewhere. If we examine the profile of Nefert, still more that of Ra-hotep, we shall find that they also have the sloping forehead and aquiline nose. The body of Ra-hotep is rounder and fatter than those in the wooden reliefs, but the lines of his countenance have a strong resemblance to those which have excited remark in the figures on the panels.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 174.--Wooden panel from the Tomb of Hosi. Drawn by Bourgoin.]

In the case of a limestone head, covered with red paint, which stands in the _Salle Civile_, in the Louvre, the cranium is no less elongated, the cheekbones are no less large, the cheeks themselves are as hollow, the chin as protuberant, and the whole head as bony and fleshless. We do not know whence it came, but we have no hesitation in agreeing with De Rouge, Mariette, and Maspero, that this head is a masterpiece from one of the early dynasties. It may be put by the side of the Meidoum couple for its vitality and individual expression. The unknown original must have been ugly almost to vulgarity, but it rouses in the spectator the same kind of admiration as a Tuscan bust of the fifteenth century, and a pleasure which is not diminished by the knowledge that the man whose faithful image is under his eyes pa.s.sed from the world some five or six thousand years ago (Fig. 177).

The little figure which occupies the place of honour in this same saloon (Plate X.), though more famous, is hardly superior to the fragment just described. It was found by Mariette in the tomb of Sekhem-ka, during his excavation of the Serapeum. Other figures of the same kind were found with it, but are hardly equal to it in merit.

They are believed to date from the fifth or sixth dynasty.

This scribe is seated, cross-legged, in an att.i.tude still familiar to those who have visited the East. The most superficial visitor to the Levant must have seen, in the audience-hall of the _cadi_ or _pacha_, the _kiatib_ crouching exactly in the same fas.h.i.+on before the chair or divan, registering sentences with his rapid _kalem_, or writing out despatches. Our scribe is listening; his thin and bony features are vibrating with intelligence; his black eye-b.a.l.l.s positively sparkle; his mouth is only closed because respect keeps him silent. His shoulders are high and, square, his chest ample, his pectoral muscles very large. People who follow a very sedentary occupation generally put on much fat on the front of their bodies, and this scribe is no exception to the rule. His arms are free of his sides; their position is easy and natural. One hand holds a strip of papyrus upon which he writes with the other, his pen being a reed. The lower parts of the body and the thighs are covered with a pair of drawers, whose white colour contrasts with the brownish red of the carnations. The breadth and truth with which the knee-joints are indicated should be remarked. The only details that have, to a certain extent, been "scamped," are the feet. Trusting to their being half hidden by the folded legs, the sculptor has left them in a very rudimentary condition.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SCRIBE

(LOUVRE)

Imp. Dufrenoy]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 175.--Wooden panel from the Tomb of Hosi. Drawn by Bourgoin.]

The eyes form the most striking feature in this figure. "They consist of an iris of rock crystal surrounding a metal pupil, and set in an eyeball of opaque white quartz. The whole is framed in continuous eyelids of bronze."[181]

[181] DE ROUGe, _Notice sommaire des Monuments egyptiens_, 1865, p. 68.

This clever contrivance gives singular vitality and animation to the face. Even the Grecian sculptor never produced anything so vivacious.

The latter, indeed began by renouncing all attempts to imitate the depth and brilliancy of the human eye. His point of departure differed entirely from that of his Memphite predecessor; his conception of his art led him, where the Egyptian would have used colour, to be content with the general characteristics of form and with its elevation to the highest pitch of n.o.bility of which it was capable. This is not the place for a comparison of the two systems, but accepting the principles of art which prevailed in early Egypt, we must do justice to those masters who were contemporary with the Pyramids. It must be acknowledged that they produced works which are not to be surpa.s.sed in their way by the greatest portraits of modern Europe. In later years the Egyptian sculptor ceased to paint the eyes. Even in the time of the Ancient Empire the Egyptian custom in this particular was the same as the Greek, so far as statues in hard stone were concerned. The great statue of Chephren is an instance. In it the chisel has merely reproduced the contours of the eyelids and the salience of the eyeball. No attempt has been made to imitate the iris or to give brightness to the pupil. In none of the royal statues that have come down to our time do we find any effort to produce this kind of illusion, either by the use of paint or by the insertion of naturally coloured substances.

There is a statue at Boulak which may, perhaps, be preferred even to the scribe of the Louvre. We have already alluded to it as the _Sheik-el-Beled_ (Fig. 7, Vol. I.). In its present state (it is without either feet or base) it has no inscription but it is sometimes called Ra-em-ke, because that was the name of the person in whose tomb it was found. It is of wood, and, with the exception of its lower members, is in marvellous preservation. The eyes are similar to those of the scribe, and seem to be fixed upon the spectator while their owner advances upon him. The type is very different from those we have hitherto been describing. The face is round and flat, and so is the trunk. The smiling good humour of the expression and the _embonpoint_ of the person indicate a man well nourished and comfortably off, a man content both with himself and his neighbours.[182]

[182] Another wooden statue of equal merit as a work of art was found in the same tomb. It represents a woman, standing.

Unfortunately there is nothing left of it but the head and the torso. _Notice des princ.i.p.aux Monuments du Musee de Boulak_, No.

493.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 176.--Wooden panel from the Tomb of Hosi. Drawn by Bourgoin]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 177.--Limestone head, in the Louvre. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]

This statue is dressed in a different fas.h.i.+on from those we have hitherto encountered. The sheik has his hips covered with a kind of petticoat gathered into pleats in front. His legs, torso, and arms are bare. The last named are of separate pieces of wood, and one of them, the bent one, is made in two parts. When the statue was first finished the joints were invisible. The whole body was covered with fine linen, like a skin. Upon this linen a thin layer of plaster was spread, by means of which, when wet, refinement could be added to the contours by the modelling stick; the colours of nature were afterwards added by the brush. Such figures as these have therefore come down to us in a condition which resembles their primitive state much less than that of the works in stone. They have, so to speak, lost their epidermis, and with it the colours which served to distinguish the flesh from the drapery.[183]

[183] The _Description de l'egypte_ (_Antiquites_, vol. v. p.

33) gives the details of a mummy-mask in sycamore wood, of fairly good workmans.h.i.+p, which was found at Sakkarah. The eyebrows and edges of the eyelids were outlined with red copper; a fine linen was stretched over the wood; over this there was a thin layer of stucco, upon which the face was painted in green.

It would seem that the sculptor in wood often counted upon this final coat of stucco to perfect his modelling. There are in fact wooden statues which seem to have been but roughly blocked out by the chisel.

There are three figures in the Louvre in which this character is very conspicuous. The largest of the three is reproduced in our Fig.

178.[184] Acacia and sycamore wood is used for this kind of work.[185]

[184] The figure in the Louvre is split deeply in several places, one of the fissures being down the middle of the face.

This latter our artist has suppressed, so as to give the figure something of its ancient aspect. These fissures are sure to appear in our humid climate. The warm and dry air of Egypt is absolutely necessary for the preservation of such works, which seem doomed to rapid destruction in our European museums.