Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/328

 29^ A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. when a few persons had to be brought in who were all in one attitude and making the same gesture,^ but it was never used as a starting-point for modifications upon the traditional modes of rendering either isolated figures or groups of figures. The Egyptians made use of these until the last days of their civilization without ever appearing to suspect their childish character. In the case of animals, a firmly-drawn profile was enough to make them easily recognizable. And yet, even in the time of the Ancient Empire, we find distinct efforts to give some variety to these silhouettes. Sometimes the oxen turn their heads towards the spectator, sometimes they swing them round to their flanks, as if to chase away the flies : but even then the heads are shown in profile.^ At Beni- Hassan We find an advance upon this. In a hunting scene, a lion, who has just brought down an ibex, is shown full face,^ but neither here or anywhere else has an attempt been made to draw the body of the animal otherwise than in profile. In his family groups the Egyptian sculptor marked the superiority of the husband and father in a similarly naive fashion. He made him much taller than the persons about him. The same contrivance was employed to mark the distinction between gods or kings and ordinary men, and between the latter and animals (Fig. 57, Vol. I.). This solution of the problem is uni- versal in the infancy of art. It was adopted by the Assyrians, the Persians, the primitive Greeks, and our own ancestors of the middle ages. It is easier to give a figure double or threefold its proper size than to add greatly to the dignity and nobility of its character. In their desire to evade difficulties, the Egyptians slurred over distinctions upon which a more advanced art would have insisted. For them every man was in the prime of life, every woman possessed of the elegant contours of a marriageable virgin. In their work in the round they proved themselves capable of bring- ing out individuality, but they restricted their attentions to the face and hardly attempted to show how the passage of years affects the contours and the firmness of flesh in both sexes. In their ^ Our Fig. 216 gives another instance of the employment of this method, and even in the time of the Ancient Empire the idea had occurred to the Egyptian artists (Fig. 200). " Lepsius, Denki/icskr, part ii. pi. 47 and 61. ^ Wilkinson, Manners and Cusioms, etc. vol. ii. p. 88.