Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/345

 The Principal Conventions in Egyptian Sculpture. 315 Sculptors and painters multiplied on their side with the multiplication of the royal and divine images ; they represented the king fighting against the enemies of Egypt or returning thanks to the gods for their assistance, and the king's subjects accompanying him to battle, or busied over the varied labours of a civilized society. They had to observe life and to study nature. By dint of so doing they created a style, a certain method of looking at and interpreting natural facts which became common to all the artists of Egypt. One of the most striking features of this style is the continual endeavour to strip form of all that is accidental and particular, to generalize and simplify it as much as possible, a tendency which finds a very natural explanation in the early endeavours of the Egyptians to represent, in their writing, the concrete shapes of every being in earth or sky. This habit of making plastic epitomes of men and animals, and even of inanimate things, was confirmed by the persistent use of ideographic characters during all the centuries of Egyptian civilization. The profession of the scribe was in time separated from that of the sculptor, but the later preserved some of the marked characteristics which it put on before this division of labour was finally established. The Egyptian eye had become accustomed to see things repre- sented in that simpHfied aspect of which the hieroglyphs are so striking an example, and to deprive individuals, by a kind of unconscious abstraction, of those details by which they stood out from their species as a whole. The most original features of Egy^ptian sculpture and its arrested development must, then, be referred, on the one hand to the nature of the materials employed, and, on the other, to the habits con- tracted during many centuries of ideographic writing.^ It has long been the fashion to attribute capital importance to what is called a canon, in describing the origin of the Egy^ptian style. The ideas which have been published on this question seem to us manifestly exaggerated ; we must examine them a little closely. The word canon comes from the Greek kovmv, a rule. As applied to the arts it has been defined as '"' a system of measure- ments by the use of which it should be possible to tell the size of any part by that of the whole, or the size of the whole by that of plastic style of Egypt by the hieroglyphs; see his Voyage da /is la Kuute-E^ypk, P- 354-
 * M. Ch. Blaxc had a glimmering of the great influence exercised over the