Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/341

 The Principal Conventions in Egyptian Sculpture. 311 the same of the long and thick beard, the shape of which was modified under the pressure of the same necessity. It is never disengaged and turned up at the end, as we see it in the paintings. .... The head covering, which is sometimes very tall and slender, is always supported at the back for nearly the whole of its height and width. The figure itself is supported either at the back or the side by a pier of varying thickness. . . ." ^ The stone is left between the two legs when one is thrust forward, between the arms and the side, and in the hollows above the hips. Nothing could have been easier than to remove these masses, after the work was otherwise complete, by means of the drill. But that Fig. 255.— Painting at Thebes (Champollicn, pi. iS6). instrument, by which the necessary holes could have been made without dangerous shocks, was certainly unknown to the Egyptians. They could only have removed the masses in question by the striking processes we have mentioned, processes which mio-ht result in the breaking of an arm or a leg. The hardest materials are also, in a sense, the most brittle. If it was difficult for the sculptor to free the limbs and head of his statue from the rock in which they were partly imprisoned, how much more difficult, nay, how impossible, it must have been to give them any energetic movement — that of running, for instance, or fighting. The beauty ^ E. Soldi, Za Sculpture Egyptienne, pp. 41, 42.