Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/354

 324 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. found. "If the squares were based upon some unchanging unit, they would be identical in every model in which they occur. But in one of these heads we find three horizontal divisions between the uraeus and the chin ; in another four. In most cases the number of the squares seems to have been entirely due to the individual caprice or convenience of the artist. There are but two examples in which another rule seems to have been followed ; in them the proportions of the squares are identical, and their intersections fall upon the same points. All that may be fairly deduced from this, however, is that they are the work of the same hands." ■•■ A second series of royal heads was found at Tanis ; others have been discovered in the Fayoum. Boulak also possesses models of the ram, the jackal, and the uraeus, of arms, legs, hands, &c. Upon a plaque from Tanis the figure of Isis appears twice, once as a sketch and once as a finished studv. From the style of these remains Mariette is disposed to think that they were not earlier than the Saite epoch. As the Egyptian intellect gradually lost its inventive powers, the study of such models as these must have played a more and more important part in artistic education ; but we have no reason to believe that their use was confined to the later ages of the monarchy. As artists became accustomed to reproduce certain fixed types, they gradually lost their familiarity with nature, and their works became ever more uniform and monotonous. This tendency is to be easily recognized in Egyptian work long before the days of Amasis and the Psemetheks ; in some degree it is found even in the productions of the Ancient Empire. The use of the models in question may have become general at the beginning of the Middle Empire. But their introduction was not due to the priests, but to the masters in the arts, who saw that they offered a sure and rapid method of instructing their scholars. Yet one more cause of the monotony of type which distinguished Egyptian art after its first renascence remains to be noticed. The Egyptians were fully conscious of the great antiquity of their civilization. They thought of other nations much as the Greeks and Romans of a later age thought of those whom they called barbarians. When the scribes had to speak of foreigners they ' MARn<:TiK, La Gaicrie dc V Egypte Ancienne a P Exposition du Trocadero, pp. 69, 70.