Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/207

 Decoration. i 2 1 with the habitations of mankind, with his clothes and furniture, which become more brilhant in colour, and more audaciously abrupt in their transitions from one hue to another. Delicate shades of difference are imperceptible by an eye blinded with the southern sun ; it sees nothing but the simplest, strongest, and frankest colour notes to the exclusion of all half-tint.^ Under a burning and never clouded sun, objects of a neutral colour do not stand out against their background, and their shadows lose a part of their value, " comme ddvordes pa7^ la diffusion et la rdverbdration dune incomparable liiinierer ^ In Egypt, a column, a minaret, a dome, hardly seem to be modelled as they stand against the depths of the sky. All three seem almost flat. The warm and varied hues with which polychromatic decoration endows buildings help us to distinguish them in such situations from the ground upon which they stand, and to accentuate their different planes. They also compensate, in some degree, for the absence of those strong shadows which elsewhere help to make contours visible. Attention is drawn to the dominant and bounding lines of an architectural composition by contrasts of tint which also serve to give force to wall paintings and bas-reliefs. comprised between a late spring and an early autumn develops itself much more rapidly than with us, and, granting that it has become so hardened that it is able to resist the long and hard frosts of winter, it receives, during the short summer, much more light and sun than its French or German sister. During those fleeting summers of the north, whose strange charm has been so often described, the sun hardly descends below the horizon ; the nights are an hour long, and not six or seven. The colour of flowers is therefore in exact proportion to the amount of light which they receive. ^ This was perceived by Goethe. In art, as in natural science, he divined before- hand some of the discoveries of our century by the innate force of his genius. He was not surprised by the discovery that the temples of classic Sicily were painted in briUiant tones, which concealed the surface of their stone and accentuated the leading lines of their architecture. He was one of the first to accept the views of Hittorf and to proclaim that the architects who had found traces of colours upon the mouldings of Greek buildings were not deceiving themselves and others. ^ We borrow these expressions from M. Ch. Blanx, who, when in Egypt, was very much struck with this phenomenon. " Those villages which approach in colour. to that Nile mud of which they are composed, hardly stand out at all against the back- ground, unless that be the sky itself or those sunny rocks which reflect the light in such a fashion that they fatigue the most accustomed eyes. I notice here, as I did in Greece, at Cape Sunium, that cupolas and round towers have their modelling almost destroyed by the strong reflections." {Voyage de la Haiilc Egyptc, 1876, p. 114). VOL. I. R