Volume II Part 18 (2/2)

It was found near the statues of Ra-hotep and Nefert

[Illustration: FIG 203--Sepulchral bas-relief, Boulak]

[Illustration: FIG 204--Bas-relief froures of iven all belong to the domain of portraiture The artist imitates the forms of those who sit to him and of the animals of the country; he copies the incidents of the daily life about hioes no farther All art is a translation, an interpretation, and, of course, the sculptors of theat theirto theive one feature predominance over another, or to combine various features in different proportions from those found in ordinary life, and by suchbetter than mere repetitions of their accidental models

They tried neither to invent nor to create

And yet the Egyptians ive concrete foryptian writing consisted, we have so a time when the nae ell marked features of its own To write the naive his portrait, a portrait whose sketchy outlines only required to be filled in by the sculptor to be coes of her Gods at a very early date, but as they were not placed in the to before our day, and we are thus unable to decide how far the necessity for their production inative faculties of the early sculptors In presence, however, of the Great Sphinx at Gizeh, in which we find one of those composite forms so often repeated in later centuries, we may fairly suspect that many more of the divine types hich we are familiar had been established The Sphinx proves that the priyptians were already bitten with the s never carved any figure e than that which keeps watch over the necropolis of Gizeh (Fig

157, Vol I) But Egypt had other Gods than these first-fruits of her reflective powers, than those s who personified for her the forces which had created the world and preserved its equilibrius, children of the sun, present and visible deities who maintained upon the earth, and especially in the valley of the Nile, the ever-threatened order established by their divine progenitors Until quite recently it was iyptians of the Ancient Es the national belief in their divine origin and alain Mariette--recovered from the well in the Temple of the Sphinx at Gizeh, nine statues or statuettes of Chephren The inscriptions upon the plinths of these statues enable us to recognize for certain the founder of the second pyraures were broken beyond recovery, but two have been successfully restored One of these, which is but little205); the other, in a56, Vol I)[205]

[205] _Notice du Musee de Boulak_, Nos 578 and 792 The discovery was ives an account of it in his _Lettres a M de Rouge sur les Resultats des Fouilles entreprises par ordre du Vice-roi d'egypte_ (_Revue Archeologique_, No 5, vol ii pp 19, 20)

An initial distinction between these royal statues and the portraits of private individuals is found in the h rank, wood or liust person of the monarch had to be immortalized a substance which was at once harder and yptians had no marble, and when they wished to do particular honour to their rain and dusky brilliance of tone make them resemble metal The slowness and difficulty hich these dense rocks yielded to the tools of the sculptor increased the value of the result, while their hardness added iures which only took form under the tools of skilful and patient workht defy the attacks of tie It is very different froh it rese is seated His head, instead of being either bare or covered with the heavy wig, is enframed in that royal head-dress which has been known, ever since the days of Champollion, as the _klaft_[206]

It consists of an a the upper part of the forehead, the cranium, and the nape of the neck It stands out boldly on each side of the face, and hangs down in two pleated lappets upon the chest The king's chin is not shaved like those of his subjects

It is adorned like that of a God with the long and narrow tuft of hair which we call _the Osiride beard_ At the back of Chephren's head, which is invisible in our illustration, there is a hawk, the syarment is, in fact, the _schenti_ about his ht hand holds a rod of so The arms end in lions' heads, and the feet are paws of the sah relief the two plants which symbolize the upper and lower country respectively; they are arranged around the hieroglyph _sa _union_

[206] This is a Coptic word_hood_

[Illustration: FIG 205--Statue of Chephren Height five feet seven inches Boulak Drawn by G Benedite]

The other statue, which now consists of little more than the head and trunk, differs from the first only in a few details The chair is without a back, and, curiously enough, the head is that of a much older man than the Chephren of the diorite statue This difference makes it pretty certain that both heads were modelled directly from nature

These royal statues are, then, portraits like the rest, but when in their presence we feel that they arein their individuality which could not have been rendered by photography or by casts from nature, had such processes been understood by their authors In spite of the unkindly ures The face, the shoulders, the pectoral muscles, and especially the knees, betray a hand no less firm and confident than those which carved the softer rocks The diorite Chephren excels ordinary statues in size--for it is larger than nature--in the richness of its throne, in the arrangenity to the head, in the existence of the beard which gives length and iht of nature; he has never forgotten that it was his business to portray Chephren and not Cheops or Snefrou; and yet he has succeeded in giving to his work the significance of a type

He has yptian belief in the semi-divine nature of their Pharaohs By its size, its pose, its expression and arrangeiven it a certain ideality We may see in these two statues, for siure, the first effort yptian art to escape froination into play

The reign of those traditional foran 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 ht satisfactory The calures, their expression of force in repose and of illimitable power, left so little to be desired that they were accepted there and thereafter 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; so, others show hi and endoith the attributes of Osiris, but, speaking generally, the favourite s and of the sculptors whom they employed was that which is first made known to us by the statue of him to e 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 yptians 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 the to the fashi+on of the day Style and technical methods were modified with time, but types, that is the attitudes and e, the mental power, and the social condition of the different persons represented, underwent little or no change

This period of single-ht also to have transmitted to later times its care and skill in portraiture, and its realistic powers generally, to use a very yptian painters and sculptors never lost those qualities entirely; they always remained fully alive to the differences of conforuished one individual, or one class, from another; but as the models furnished by the past increased in number, their execution became more facile and superficial, and their reference to nature became less direct and continual Neither the art of Thebes nor that of Sais seeinal and expressive as the two statues from Meidoum or the _Sheik-el-beled_, at Boulak, or the _scribe_ in the Louvre

We may easily understand what surprise and adyptian art excited aists When the exploration of the Memphite necropolis revealed what had up to that time been an unknoorld, Nestor L'Hote, one of the companions of Champollion, was the first to comprehend its full ient and faithful draughtsman and his artistic nature enabled him to appreciate, even better than the illustrious founder of egyptology, the singular charm of an art free froypt, Charandeur and nobility of the Theban reave vent to his enthusiaslimpse of one or two of those mastabas which were afterwards to be explored by Lepsius and Mariette Writing of the tos, he says: ”The sculptures of this toance and the finesse of their execution Their relief is so slight that it may be compared to that of a five-franc piece Such consummate workmanshi+p in a structure so ancient confirher we yptian civilization the more perfect do her works of art becoyptian people, unlike that of other races, was born in a state of maturity”[207]

[207] _Journal des Savants_, 1851, pp 53, 54

”Of Egyptian art,” he says elsewhere, ”we know only the decadence”

Such an assertion must have appeared paradoxical at a time when the Turin Museum already possessed, and exhibited, so s And yet Nestor L'Hote was right, as the discoveries made since his time have abundantly proved, and that fact e a part of our exayptian sculpture to the productions of the Ancient Empire

-- 3 _Sculpture under the First Theban Empire_