W. M. Flinders Petrie

“ THE CHARACTER OF EGYPTIAN ART
The art of a country, like the character of the inhabitants, belongs to the nature of the land. The climate, the scenery, the contrasts of each country, all clothe the artistic impulse as diversely as they clothe the people themselves. A burly, florid Teuton in his furs and jewellery, and a lithe brown Indian in his waist-cloth, would each look entirely absurd in the other’s dress. ”

“ Assuredly all mankind has looked on the works of Egypt as giving a sense of these qualities before all others. Closely connected is the sense of Endurance, which was enjoined in words, and carried into practice in the laborious work on the hardest rocks. It was for endurance that statues were made of diorite or granite, though they were painted with life-like hues, so that their material was scarcely seen. Upon these primary qualities was built a rich and varied character, reflected in the elaborate and beautiful sculpture which covered, but never interfered with, the grand mass of a monument. ”

“ Our consideration here is with the art. When we look over the varied artistic expression of different races, we see that each people has seized some one excellence, growing out of its conditions, and adapted to its feelings and utilities. We can admire each excellence in turn, and see that in each of these qualities no other people has reached the same perfection. We must recognise that artistic expression is not only shown in sculpture and painting, but in literature, mechanical design, and the amenities and adaptation of the social organism. ”

“ Within those conditions there was scope for most vivid portraiture, most beautiful harmony, most delicate expression, but the Egyptian was wise enough to know his conditions and to obey them. In that obedience lay his greatness.
The truest analysis of art—that of Tolstoy—results in defining it as a means of communicating emotion. It may be the emotion produced by beauty or by loathsomeness; each expression is equally art, though each is not equally desirable art. The emotion may be imparted by words, by forms, by sounds; all are equally vehicles of different kinds of art. ”

“ The Persian and Mesopotamian civilisation triumphed in its glorious use of coloured glaze decoration, which has been carried westward to Syria and Rhodes, and still continues in the vast domes of coloured tiles in Spain.
In Arab art we meet the exquisite calm of geometrical design with various angles, which cannot be analysed at a glance like a Roman pavement: they arrest the eye to linger over them, to seek how they arise, and what they mean.
Further east, it is difficult for us to enter sufficiently into the fundamental feelings of the races, to enable us to value their art truly. ”

“ As true art, then—that is, the expression of his being, and the communication to others of his best feelings and sense of things—the Egyptian work must stand on the highest plane of reality. It would have been a falsehood to his nature to aspire, as a Gothic architect sometimes did, in towers and pinnacles which crush their foundations and will not hold together without incongruous bonds. ”

“ The Egyptian possessed in splendid perfection the sense of Strength, Permanence, Majesty, Harmony, and effective Action, tempered with a sympathy and kindliness [10] which cemented a vast disciplined fabric. And these aims of life as a whole he embodied and expressed in his art, with a force and truth which has impressed his character on all who look on his works. He fulfils the canon of true art as completely as any race that has come after him. ”

“ There is no point in calling the Egyptian childish in his abilities, as every other nation has been equally childish in some other respects—the Roman in his abject submission to omens, the Greek in playing with words, the Assyrian in his inaccuracy, the Arab in his drawing. In short, there is no essential difference in the capacity for showing national life and feeling by the art of each country; and in the facility and truth of expression Egypt stands in the first rank of those lands where Art has exhibited the character of man. ”

“ There is no question of which dress is intrinsically the best in the world; each is relatively the best for its own conditions, and each is out of place in other conditions. So it is with art: it is the expression of thought and feeling in [2] harmony with its own conditions. The only bad art is that which is mechanical, where the impulse to give expression has decayed, and it is reduced to mere copying of styles and motives which do not belong to its actual conditions. An age of copying is the only despicable age. ”

“ When once a sculptor was trained to the peculiarities of one stone he would not be likely to enter on all the difficulties of a fresh material. A man trained for years to slicing and bruising out granite without the least fear of a crack, would not relish hewing soft sandstones that split, or limestone that could not be trusted with its own weight on a finished surface. Certainly the men who learned sculpture on the softer materials would be helpless on the granite. ”

“ The smallest as well as the largest work seems complete and inevitable, without being constrained by any limitations of time, or labour, or thought. For the expression of royal energy, dignity, and equanimity the figures of Khufu and Khafra are unsurpassed. In the vivid expression of personal character no age has surpassed the statues of the officials and their wives. The style of other ages may be more scholastic, more amusing, or more graceful, but for all that constitutes great art no period can compare with that of the mighty pyramid kings. ”

“ Before we can understand any art the first step is to discriminate between the different periods and their various styles, and to observe the characteristics of the several schools. If we consider medieval architecture, we separate the many periods from Saxon to Renaissance; if we turn to painting, we distinguish many stages between Cimabue and Canaletto, yet these variations belong but to a single revolution of civilisation, and are comprised within some centuries; in Egyptian art we have to deal with seven revolutions of civilisation and thousands of years. ”

“ Truth and Justice were qualities much sought for in life, and were expressed by the artist in the reality of his immense blocks of stone, often more hidden than seen, and in the fair and even bearing of all material, without any tricks or paradoxes of structure. ”

“ In classical Greece, the supremacy in vital sculpture and architectural proportion has so filled the attention of the modern world that the higher achievement of surrounding nations in other directions has been largely overlooked. In each of the special qualities that we note in other peoples the Greeks were their inferiors.
Rome was largely dominated by other races in its development; but in the art of civilisation and raising subject peoples, in the shaping of life and rule of law, it stood far above any ancient nation. ”

“ The whole level of art of the XVIIIth dynasty is as much below that of the XIIth, as the style of the XIIth is below that of the IVth dynasty. The scholastic work of the XIIth is followed by a treatment which is almost always conventional in the XVIIIth; and the XIXth dynasty shows merely a degradation of what preceded it. At the close of the XVIIth dynasty there emerges from the turmoil of the Hyksos barbarism a rude but lively style of drawing, with sculpture of clumsy figures and badly-formed hieroglyphs. ”

“ In the opening chapter we have considered the point of view from which the art of Egypt—like that of every other country—must be approached. The physical conditions which surround man will necessarily control his expression of thought and his perception of beauty. Forms and designs growing out of the conditions of one land will be inappropriate in another land, and lose most, or all, of their value if transported to different surroundings. Hence it is futile to attempt to contrast the art of one country directly with that of another. ”

“ In Medieval Europe, though sculpture scarcely reached the vitality of classical work, yet in expression it stood as high as in any school of art; and in the architecture the sense of expansion and aspiration—the spiritual aspect—reaches a higher level than man has touched elsewhere.
In Italy, the expression of art in painting was its great achievement, in harmony with the character of grace seen in other lines of Italian production. ”

“ The old style of glazing continued down to Arab times; a steatite amulet, in the cutting, and colour of the glaze, might well have been of the Shishak age, but for the Arabic inscription upon it. And at the present day some creditable imitations of ancient glazing are made for fraudulent trade at Thebes.
Turning to the more technical matters, the body of the ware is always a porous, friable, siliceous paste; in some cases so soft that it can be rubbed away from the broken surfaces by the finger. The unglazed beads and figures occasionally found can hardly be handled without breaking. ”

“ In the XIIth dynasty the eye is rather too forward; and in the XVIIIth there is hardly a single statue that is correct, the eyes usually projecting to the plane of the brow. On observing even the finest figures of later times it will be seen how purely conventional is their treatment; the mouth and eyes are cold and mechanical, and it is seldom that any one feature even approaches the truth of the early art. ”

“ Their perception of Nature in its strange and mysterious moods, which they show by the brush, is almost as penetrating as in the literature of China. Their exquisite sense of fitness, and of taste for beauty of workmanship, only makes us begin to realise the clumsiness of our own cast-iron performances. ”

“ We might as well compare the beauty of a tropical garden with that of an alpine forest. The only ground of comparison is that of expressing the character and emotions of the artists; and that art which conveys the mental state of the people most readily is the most perfect art. ”

“ It should be noticed that the divisions of artistic periods are often not the same as those of political history. Politically, the history divides at the XVIIth dynasty with the fall of the Hyksos, and at the XXIInd dynasty with the rise of the Delta [vi] government. But artistically the changes are under Tahutmes I, when Syrian influences broke in, and under the XXVIth dynasty, when the classical Greeks began to dominate the art.
The effect of foreign influence in art is quite apart from political power; it is due to rival activities which may or may not mean a physical domination. ”

“ In Crete, so far as we can yet see, the pre-eminent [154] facilities were the expression of motion, and the development of decorative form, and especially colour, upon pottery. Classical art never attained to the skill shown by the prehistoric art in these directions.
In Assyria, figure and animal sculpture stood very high in the best period; and the free adaptation of this to the purposes of life, as we see in the great development of friezes on the palace walls, was the distinguishing feature. No people seem to have lived amidst their art more than the Assyrians. ”

“ This present handbook is intended to aid in the understanding of Egyptian art, and the illustrations and descriptions are selected for that purpose only. The history of the art would require a far greater range of examples, in order to illustrate the growth and decay of each of the great periods; whereas here only the most striking works of each period are shown, in order to contrast the different civilisations. The origins and connections of the art in each age are scarcely touched, and the technical details are only such as are needed to see the conditions of the art. ”

“ One fine piece arrests us in the black granite statue of Ramessu II (fig. 43) , of which an entire view is given in fig. 11. The whole pose is fairly good, the face looking down toward the spectator below. The king is no longer the dignified organiser of the Old Kingdom, with a vision far away beyond everyday matters, but he is obviously considering the opinion of the man in front of him. The detail is almost equal to that of the previous dynasty; the eye is natural, the nose rather formal, the lips with the sharp edge even more developed than before, and the chin and throat less modelled. ”

“ In the XIIth dynasty the finest lines were hidden by it; and on coming down to the Ptolemaic times the plasterer ignored all the sculpture below, filling the figures with a smooth daub of plaster on which the painter drew what he liked. It seems strange why the sculptors should have continued to put fine work and detail on to a surface where they were going to be at once ignored. It suggests a rigid bureaucracy in which the sculpture had to be passed by one man, and the painting by another, without any collaboration. ”