Volume II Part 26 (2/2)

The abuse of this latter process is one of the great defects of Egyptian technique; but there was another, and, perhaps,adopted by the Egyptians, and elaborated at a very early date, reater effect upon their plastic arts than has generally been supposed The characters employed by them, at least in monumental situations, were not merely symbols of sounds, as the characters of later syllabic or alphabetic fores of objects Practical requirements soon led to the simplification of such objects, to the suppression of all details beyond those necessary for identification

The figures employed were thus soon reduced to mere empty outlines

Shadow and colour, all those details which distinguish the species of a genus and the individuals of a species, were carefully and systen which stood for a lion or a h between one man or one lion and another there are differences of stature, of age, of colour, of strength, and of beauty

Now, in the early ages of Egyptian civilization, when the hieroglyphs in the Memphite necropolis were chiselled in relief, the same hand must have been employed upon the portraits of any particular inhabitants of a tomb and upon the inscriptions which accompanied thes

174-6), that there is no appreciable difference between the technique of the figures and of the acco is visible in both The ies which play the part of written characters are much smaller than the three portraits, and that is all The crafts of scribe and sculptor were thus combined in one man; his chisel traced indifferently funerary portraits and hieroglyphs When the use of papyrus led to , the two professions were separated The scribe wrote sometimes with the kalem upon papyrus, sometimes with the brush or the point upon wood, stucco, or stone But he always found enough to do in his own profession without co it with another

Sculptors and painters multiplied on their side with the es; they represented the king fighting against the ene thanks to the Gods for their assistance, and the king's subjects acco 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 certainnatural facts which becaypt One of thefeatures of this style is the continual endeavour to strip foreneralize 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 ofplastic epitos, was confir 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 becos represented in that si an example, and to deprive individuals, by a kind of unconscious abstraction, of those details by which they stood out froinal features of Egyptian sculpture and its arrested development must, then, be referred, on the one hand to the nature of the materials ebeen the fashi+on to attribute capital iin of the Egyptian style The ideas which have been published on this question seeerated; we must exalireat influence exercised over the plastic style of Egypt by the hieroglyphs; see his _Voyage dans la Haute-egypte_, p 354

The word _canon_ comes from the Greek ?????, a _rule_ As applied to the arts it has been defined as ”a system of measurements 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 any one of its parts”[307] The idea of proportion, upon which every canon must rest, is a creation of the brain A canon, therefore, is the result of those searching and coreat intellectual gifts are capable Each of the artsa proper relation between all the eleures

[307] _Dictionnaire de l'Academie des Beaux-Arts_, under the word _Canon_

The finest examples of a canon as applied to architecture are furnished by the Greek orders Given the smallest member of an Ionic or Doric order, the dimensions of all the other members of the column and its entablature may be calculated with al of the kind in Egyptian architecture There is no constant proportion between the heights and thicknesses of the shaft, the capital, and the entablature; there is no constant relation between their shapes In a single building, and in a single order, we find proportions varying between one hall or court and another

The word _canon_ has an analogous sense when applied to sculpture We establish a canon e say that a figure should be so h, and that its limbs should bear a certain proportion to the same unit It would be the same if, as has often been proposed, the medius of the hand were erected into the unit of ure would then be divided into a larger nuated this question, but we need not dwell upon the results of their inquiries The Greeks had the canon of Polycletus; the Romans that of Vitruvius, while Leonardo da Vinci set an exaated the question since his time[308]

[308] These researches are described in the chapter entitled _Des Proportions du Corps Humain_ of M CH BLANC'S _Grayptians a canon? Did they choose some one part of the human body and keep all the other parts in a constant mathematical relation with it? Did their canon, if they had one, change with time? Is it true that, in deference to the said canon, all the artists of Egypt living at one tiures?

It has sometimes been pretended that in each century the priests decided upon the diiven by artists to their figures Such an assertion can hardly be brought into harmony with the facts observed

The often quoted words of Diodorus have been taken as a text: ”The Egyptians claim as their disciples the oldest of the Greek sculptors, especially Telecles and Theodoros, both sons of Rhaecos, who executed the statue of the Pythian Apollo for the inhabitants of Samos Half of this statue, it is said, was executed at Samos by Telecles, the other half at Ephesus by Theodoros, and the two parts so exactly fitted each other that the whole statue appeared to be the work of a single sculptor After having arranged and blocked out their stone, the Egyptians executed the work in such fashi+on that all the parts adapted themselves one to another in the sure into twenty-one parts and a quarter, upon which the whole syulated”[309]

[309] DIODORUS, i 98, 5-7

We may ask what authority should attach to the words of Diodorus, a conte to the Pharaonic period But when the an to be examined it was proclaiures were found upon the to each other at right angles These, of course, were the canonical standards mentioned by Plato and Diodorus

Great was the disappointment when these squares were counted In one picture containing three individuals, two seated figures, one beside the other, are inscribed in fifteen of the squares; a standing figure in front of theure is comprised in nineteen squares[311] In another place we find twenty-two squares and a quarter between the sole of the foot and the crown of the head[312]

In yet another, twenty-three[313] As for the division given by Diodorus, it never occurs at all, and in fact it is hardly to be reconciled with the natural punctuation of the human body by its articulation and points of section

[310] LEPSIUS, _Denkmaeler_, part iii plate 12

[311] _Ibid_ plate 78 It is in this division into nineteen parts that M Blanc finds his proof that the medius of the extended hand was the canonical unit (_Graranite apartypte_, p 232 Two figures upon the ceiling of a tomb at assouan are similarly divided

[313] LEPSIUS, _Denkmaeler_, part iii p 282