Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/252

 2 24 A History of Art ix Ancient Egypt. of Egyptian art to escape from mere realism and to bring the higher powers of the imagination into play. The reign of those traditional forms which were to be so despotic in Egypt began at the same time. The type created by the sculptors of the fourth dynasty, or perhaps earlier, for the representation of the Pharaoh in all the mysterious dignity of his position, was thought satisfactory. The calm majesty of these figures, their expression of force in repose and of illimitable power, left so little to be desired that they were accepted there and there- after. Centuries rolled away, the royal power fell again and again before foreign enemies and internal dissensions, but with every restoration of the national independence and of the national rulers, the old form was revived. There are variants upon it ; some royal statues show Pharaoh standing, others show him sitting and endowed with the attributes of Osiris, but, speaking generally, the favourite model of the kings and of the sculptors wdiom they employed was that which is first made known to us by the statue of him to whom we owe the second pyramid. The only differences between it and the colossi of Amenophis III. at Thebes are to be found in their respective sizes, in their original condition, and in the details of their features. The moulds in which the thoughts of the Egyptians were to receive concrete expression through so many centuries were formed, then, by their ancestors of the Ancient Empire. All the later revivals of artistic activity consisted in attempts to compose variations upon these early themes, to remodel them, with more or less felicity, according to the fashion of the day. Style and technical methods were modified with time, but types, that is the attitudes and motives employed to characterise the age, the mental power, and the social condition of the different persons represented, underwent little or no change. This period of single-minded and devoted study of nature ouofht also to have transmitted to later times its care and skill in portraiture, and its realistic powers generally, to use a very modern phrase. Egyptian painters and sculptors never lost those qualities entirely ; they always remained fully alive to the differences of conformation and physiognomy which distinguished one individual, or one class, from another ; but as the models furnished by the past increased in number, their execution