Charles Chipiez

“ The mastaba was the private tomb of the great lord or rich citizen of primitive Egypt; the pyramid was the royal tomb for the same epoch, the tomb of that son of the gods, almost a god himself, before whom all foreheads were bowed into the dust. As his head towered over those of his prostrate subjects during life, so, after death, should his sepulchre rise high above the comparatively humble tombs of his proudest servants. The most imposing mastabas, before the sand had buried them to the summit, must have looked small enough beside those prodigious masses. ”

“ Seti was present in his own temple. His noble head, at once human and heroic, mild and proud, stood out from the wall and seemed to regard us with a gentle smile. A wandering ray of sunlight penetrated into the temple, and, falling upon the gentle salience of the sculptured figures, gave them a relief and animation which was almost illusive. A procession of young girls, whose graceful forms are veiled only by their chastity, advance towards the hero with as much freedom as respect will allow.... Their beauty attracts us while their dignity forbids all approach. ”

“ The artist has wished to unite in a single being the highest powers of life and nature—the bull, the lion, the eagle: these are types of physical force differently applied. Patient and tenacious in the bull, who drags the plough and transports the heaviest burdens; violent and impetuous in the lion, while in the king of birds the formidable strength of beak and talons add to the fear inspired by his lightning flight. Finally, the head and countenance are those of a man, the impersonation of intelligent force, of will governed by reflection, before which every living thing has to bow. ”

“ In our day the great ruins are sad and monotonous enough. The rain of many centuries has washed away their paint; their ornaments of metal and faïence, of ivory and cedar, have fallen from the walls; the hand of man has combined with the slow action of time to reduce them to their elements, and nothing of their original beauty remains but here and there a fragment or a hint of colour. And yet when we bring these scanty vestiges together we find that enough is left to give the taste and invention of the Assyrian ornamentist a very high place in our respect. ”

“ If my expressions were to convey but a thousandth part of what I felt, a thousandth part of all that might with truth be said of such objects, if I succeeded in tracing but a faint sketch, in the dimmest colours, of the marvels of Karnak, I should be taken, at least for an enthusiast, perhaps for a madman. I shall content myself with saying that no people, either ancient or modern, have had a national architecture at once so sublime in scale, so grand in expression, and so free from littleness as that of the ancient Egyptians. ”

“ No suspicion of the wealth of suggestion latent especially in the latter, seems to have dawned upon the Assyrian mind. If we except a few terra-cotta statuettes, the artist who in some way gave proof of so much resource, of so much skill and ingenuity, seems never to have felt the charm of female beauty. The beauty of woman is the light of nature, the perennial joy of the eye; to exclude it from the ideal world created by the plastic arts is to condemn that world to a perpetual twilight, to cast over it a veil of chill monotony and sadness. ”

“ The existence of a few child-like conventions, from which they never shook themselves free, cannot prevent us from feeling deep admiration for the insight into life, the purity of contour, the freedom and truth of design which distinguish their bas-reliefs and paintings. Egyptian decoration is everywhere informed by a fertile invention and a happy choice of motives, by a harmony of tints which charms the eye even now, when the endless tapestry with which tombs and houses, palaces and sanctuaries, were hung, is rent and faded. ”

“ In our own day, and over the whole of the vast continent that stretches from China to Asia Minor, there is not a stuff, however humble, that is woven on the loom or embroidered by the needle, but betrays an instinctive feeling for harmony so true and subtle that every artist wonders at it, and the most tasteful of our art workmen despair of reaching its perfection, and yet many of these faultless harmonies were conceived and realized in the tent of the nomad shepherd. ”

“ While in every other country bodies after a few years are nothing but a few handfuls of dust, in Egypt they creep out in thousands to the light of day, from grottoes in the flanks of the mountains, from pits sunk through the desert sand and from hollows in the sand itself. They rise accompanied by long inscriptions that speak for them, and make us sharers in their joys and sorrows, in their religious beliefs and in the promises in which they placed their hopes when their eyes were about to close for ever. ”

“ The ingenuity of man combined with the process of nature to preserve these figures to generations in the remote future, to a time when they could excite interest enough to save them from destruction and to ensure them a chance of eternal existence. To the thick walls of the mastabas, to the well-concealed serdabs, and, more than all, to the constantly increasing mask of sand laid upon the cemeteries of Gizeh and Sakkarah by the winds from the desert, did they owe their preservation through the troublous times which were in store for Egypt. ”

“ We can hardly be mistaken in recognizing a god in the personage seated on a richly decorated throne, towards whom two or three figures, sometimes of smaller size than himself, advance in an attitude of respectful homage. He is crowned with a lofty tiara, a long beard flows over his breast, a robe of fine plaited stuff enwraps his whole body and falls to his feet. He is a man in the prime of life; his air and costume must have been taken from those of the king. May we not look upon him as the first sketch for the Greek Zeus, the Zeus of Homer and Phidias? ”

“ Justice has been rendered to the richness of its architecture, to the skill of its painters and sculptors, to the inventive fertility of its handicraftsmen and the refinement of their taste. And yet no one had attempted to do for Egypt what such men as Winckelmann and Ottfried Müller did for Greece, Etruria, and Rome. The methods of analysis and critical description which have long been employed with success upon another field, had never been applied to her art as a whole; no one had attempted to trace the steps of Egyptian genius during its long and slow evolution. ”

“ In Egypt we have already encountered the pyramid, but even there the tomb-chamber is in most cases cut in the rock itself, and the huge mass of stone above it is nothing more than a sort of colossal lid. Funerary architecture is not content, like that of civil or religious buildings, to borrow its materials from the rock; it cuts and chisels the living rock itself. In every country the first idea that seems to occur to man, when he has the mortal remains of his own people to make away with, is to confide them to the earth. ”

“ In the whole wreck of antiquity there is no loss which lovers of art find so hard to bear, as the complete annihilation of the works of those great painters whom the ancients put at least upon the same level as their most famous sculptors; and who would not rejoice to be able, by the remains of contemporary though inferior productions, to trace a reflection, distant and feeble perhaps, but yet faithful so far as it goes, of a whole art which has been lost to the world? ”

“ There is nothing like a central group in which the episodes and incidents of the conflict could, as it were, be gathered up and epitomized. The sculptor exhausts himself in striving after the confused wealth of reality; our eye loses itself among the groups of combatants who seem to be sown broadcast over the field of the relief. The historian may find in it many curious details, but he who looks only for aesthetic enjoyment is soon bored. The whole composition is as confused as a real hand-to-hand fight. ”

“ The constructor then gives place to the architect. The latter, of course, always keeps the practical end in view, but it is not his sole preoccupation. The house, as he builds it, has to respond to all the wants, intellectual as well as corporeal, of civilized man; the tomb must embody his ideas of death and a future life; the magnificent dimensions and the gorgeous decorations of the temple must give expression to the inexpressible, must symbolize the divine majesty to the eyes of men, and help to make it comprehensible by the crowds that come to sacrifice and pray. ”

“ With a single ramp we get a tower whose four faces are repetitions of each other, but here we have a true façade, on which a happy contrast is established between the unbroken stages and those upon which the ramps appear—between oblique lines and lines parallel with the soil. The building gains in repose and solidity, and its true scale becomes more evident than when the eye is led insensibly from base to summit by a monotonous spiral. ”

“ Thus if we wish thoroughly to understand Greece, we must start from Memphis and go through Babylon and Nineveh, Tyre and Sidon. But Greece will be the aim of our voyage, and Egypt will interest us less on her own account than on account of that unique and unrivalled people who inherited her inventions and discoveries, and made them the foundation for a productiveness in which are summarized all the useful labours of antiquity. Egyptian art will be followed by us down to the moment in which it lost its creative force and with it its prestige. ”

“ We may become better acquainted than we are now with the monumental history of Mesopotamia, but we shall never find within her borders artists worthy to be placed on a level with those Theban masters.
And if we compare the sculptors of Thebes and Nineveh, we shall arrive at the same conclusion. On the one hand we find artists who, whether they worked for the tomb or the temple, in the most stubborn or the most kindly materials, chiselled images that either delight us with their simple truth, or impress us with their noble gravity and colossal size. ”