Charles Chipiez

“ 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. ”

“ The attention of the visitor to the temple would be instantly seized by the beauty and commanding position of this doorway, which, moreover, by its broad and mysterious shadows, suggested the secos hidden in the flanks of the mountains, to which all the courts were but the prelude.
These terraced courts have surprised all visitors to the cenotaph of Hatasu. "No one will deny," says Mariette, "that the temple of Dayr-el-Bahari is a strange construction, and that it resembles an Egyptian temple as little as possible!" ”

“ Those rich and populous countries have, doubtless, a civilization which stretches back nearly as far as that of Egypt and Assyria, a civilization which has produced works both of fine and of industrial art which in many respects equalled those of the nations with which we are now occupied. In all those countries there are buildings which impress by their mass and by the marvellous delicacy of their ornamentation, sculptures of a singular freedom and power, and decorative painting which charms by its skilful use of brilliant colour as well as by the facility and inventive fancy of its design. ”

“ 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 another consideration of still greater importance; the artistic remains of Greece form an almost unbroken series, from the humble and timid attempts of nascent sculpture to the brilliant masterpieces of Phidias and Polycletus, and show the steps by which the artist succeeds in passing from one style to another, from curves and interlacing lines, from all mere abstract combinations, to the imitation of nature, to the representation of bodies which breathe, feel, and speak, which move and struggle. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Seated in the form of colossal statues in front of the temples, in bas-reliefs upon pylons, upon the walls of porticos and pillared halls, he was represented sometimes offering homage to the gods, sometimes leading his troops to battle or bringing them home victorious. The supreme efforts of architect and sculptor were directed to constructing for their prince a tomb which should excel all others in magnificence and durability, or to immortalizing him by a statue which should raise its head as much above its rivals as the royal power surpassed the power and dignity of ordinary men. ”

“ No other race has given birth in its funerary architecture, to a type so pure, a type which may be explained in every detail by a master-idea at once original and well defined. We therefore dwelt upon it at some length and described it with the care which it demanded. We found it again in the pyramids, the royal tombs of the Ancient Empire, which though sensibly modified by the great change in proportion, by the colossal dimensions which the pride of the Pharaohs gave to one part of their tomb, are yet penetrated by the same spirit. ”

“ Travel over Egypt; examine the scenes painted and sculptured upon the walls of sepulchral chambers; read the inscriptions carved upon stone or traced in ink upon the rolls of papyrus, and you will find yourself compelled to modify the false notions you have imbibed as to the Egyptian philosophers. Nothing could be more cheerful, more amusing or more frank, than the social life of this pleasure-loving people. Far from wishing to die, they prayed to the gods for a long life and a happy old age ”

“ But an indescribable purity of taste suffices to betray their real origin to all those who possess knowledge and delicate perceptions. That origin is still Greece, but Greece in her lighter and more playful moments, when, leaving the representation of gods and heroes, she condescends to treat the familiar objects of domestic life, and does it with an ease of which her great writers, notably Plato and Aristophanes, had also found the secret, when they passed from epic tragedy to comedy, from the noblest eloquence to hearty expressions of enjoyment. ”

“ When quite close to them their summits and angles can no longer be seen. The wonder which they cause is not like that caused by a great work of art. It is the sense of their simple grandeur of form and of the disproportion between the individual power and stature of man and these colossal creations of his hands. The eye can hardly embrace them, nor the imagination grasp their mass. ”

“ But even before Cheops, Chefren, and their subjects had risen from their tombs, the historian might have divined by analogy, and described by no very bold conjecture, the essential characteristics of Egyptian art during its first centuries. Whether we speak of an individual, of a school, or of a people, every artistic career which follows its natural course and is not rudely broken through, ends sooner or later in conventionality, in that which is technically called mannerism. But mannerism is never the beginning of art. Art always begins by humble and sincere attempts to render what it sees. ”

“ It results from this that the works of the Greek artists, mutilated by time and accident as they are, serve as models and teachers for our painters and sculptors, a rôle which they will continue to fill until the end of time. They form a school, not, as some have thought, to enable us to dispense with nature, the indispensable and eternal master, but to incite to such an ardent and intelligent study of her beauties, as may lead to the creation of great works, works capable, like those of the Greeks, of giving visible expression to the highest thoughts. ”

“ Our age is the age of history; it interests itself above all others in the sequence of social phenomena and their organic development, an evolution which Hegel explained by the laws of thought. It would be more than absurd in these days to accept Greek art as a thing self-created in its full perfection, without attempting to discover and explain the slow and careful stages by which it arrived at its apogee in the Athens of Pericles. ”

“ The memorable exploration to which we have alluded, and many others which it would take too long to enumerate, have not only made known to us the most original and most fertile period of Greek sculpture, but have given us much information as to that art which, when combined with the statues of Phidias and Alcamenes, reared those splendid creations which have been reconstructed with such skill and care by the artist and the archæologist; we mean Greek architecture at its best, the purest and the most complete architecture which the world has yet seen. ”

“ Their chances are small of finding those objects of art which, by their beauty and elegance, repay any amount of toil and expense. The remains which they bring to light have little to say to our æsthetic perceptions; they repeat a few types with an extreme monotony; but, on the other hand, they carry our thoughts back to a point far nearer the cradle of our race than the myths of early history or even the monumental remains of Egypt and Chaldæa. They cast some slight illumination upon those distant ages of which humanity has preserved no recollection. ”

“ From cornice to foundation, upon wall and column, it is covered with an unending series of wall paintings, which, like a gorgeous tapestry, envelop and embellish it without hiding any of the details of its construction.
The polychromatic decoration of the Egyptians is to be explained, like that of the Assyrians, of the Greeks, of the Italians, and of all other southern nations, by the quality and quantity of their daylight and the way in which it affected their visual organs. The more intense the light, the more pleasure does the eye receive from strength and variety of colour. ”

“ It is easy to understand how, with the progress of civilization, the more historic incidents in the life of an individual, and especially when that individual was a king, came to be figured in preference to those which were more general in their application. To embellish the tomb of a conqueror with pictures of his battles and victories was to surround him after death with the images, at least, of those things which made his happiness or his honour while alive. ”

“ Our route will conduct us from the shores of the Nile to those of the Euphrates and Tigris, over the plains of Medea and Persia and Asia Minor to the shores of Phœnicia, to Cyprus and Rhodes. But beyond the obelisks and pyramids of Egypt, beyond the towers of Chaldæa and the domes of Nineveh, the lofty colonnades of Persepolis, the fortresses and rock-cut tombs of Phrygia and Lycia, beyond the huge ramparts of the cities of Syria, we shall never cease to perceive on the horizon the sacred rock of the Athenian acropolis ”

“ When we have crossed the threshold of the Propylæa, andxxxvii have visited the Parthenon, the Erecthæum, and the temple of the Wingless Victory; when we have seen all Greece become covered with monuments of architecture and sculpture, which, without rivalling those of Athens in purity of line or finesse of execution, bear the impress of the same style and the same taste; when we have seen Praxiteles and Scopas succeed to Phidias and Polycletus, will it not cost us a struggle to quit the scene of so many wonders and conclude our voyage? ”

“ A combination of circumstances that is unique in the history of the world gave to the contemporaries of Pericles and Alexander the power of approaching more nearly to perfection, in their works of art, than men of any other race or any other epoch. In no other place or time have ideas been so clearly and completely interpreted by form; in no other place or time have the intellectual qualities been so closely wedded to a strong love for beauty and a keen sensibility to it. ”

“ How, then, can we doubt that here, as elsewhere, there were alternations of grandeur and poverty, of periods of conquest and expansion and epochs of civil war or of defeat by foreign invaders? May we not believe that through the clouds which obscure the causes of such changes we may catch glimpses of those periods of decadence and renascence which, following one upon the other, exhausted in the end the genius of the race? ”

“ During all those thousands of years not the faintest trace is to be discovered of that spirit from which sprung the republican constitutions of Greece and ancient Italy, a spirit which, in yet later times, has led to the parliamentary governments of Christian Europe. The Egyptian labourer or artisan never dreamt of calling in question the orders of any one who might be master for the time. Absolute obedience to the will of a single man—such was the constant and instinctive national habit, and by it every movement of the social machine, under foreign and native kings alike, was regulated. ”

“ Are we to believe," he cries, "that this majestic river and the fertile soil through which it flows, this azure sky with its unclouded sun, produced a nation of living mummies, a race of solemn philosophers who looked upon life in this world as a burden to be shuffled off as quickly as possible? ”