Volume II Part 31 (1/2)

In so the excavations at the Serapeum, Mariette opened the tomb of Ka-em-nas, a son of Rameses II When the mummy chamber was entered, the lower parts of the walls and of the ht The floor was streith scraps of the saold leaf were found in the tomb Mariette was then in want of funds, and in order that the excavations ht proceed, he obtained authority froold, to which of course, no scientific interest was attached The thick gold mask of the prince and the fine jewelry which adorned his mummy are now in the Louvre

The mummy's toe-nails, bracelets, and lips, and the linen ilt The feet are soilt

So too is the shroud Those of princes and great personages are soold from head to foot

[Illustration: FIGS 289, 290--Tables for offerings; froyptian artisans understood these delicate operations at a very early date Even in the to illustrated in full We need hardly say that a decorative industry which disposed of such co_, the imitation of the veins and textures of wood, and also those of the different kinds of granite, upon other substances In more than one instance we find the commoner kinds of stone thus made to look like rarer and more costly materials

CHAPTER V

THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS

-- 1 _Definition and Characteristics of Industrial Art_

The expression, _industrial art_, has sometimes been severely criticised, but yet it answers to a real distinction founded upon the nature of things, and we do not see that it could be dispensed with

When the artist sets abouta statue or a picture his only aim is to produce a fine work He does not take _utility_, in the unphilosophic sense of the word, into account The task which he sets before himself is to discover sohts and feelings This done, his end is acco work of art is self-contained and self-sufficient Its _raison d'etre_ is to satisfy one of the deepest and most persistent desires of the human mind, the _aesthetic sentiment_, or _instinct for the beautiful_

In the industrial arts it is different When a cabinet-maker or a potter sets to work to produce an easy chair, or a vase, his first idea is to make a chair in which one may sit comfortably, or a vessel to which liquids may be safely entrusted and from which they may be easily poured At first, the artisan does not look beyond fulfilling these wants, but a time comes, and comes very soon, when he feels impelled to ornament the furniture or pottery upon which he is at work He is no longer content to turn out that which isthat coins by adding ornaeometrical lines; this he soon follows up with foranic life, with leaves and flowers, with figures of s at once to be an artist But his productions are strictly works of industrial art, and although they ht of their beauty, that beauty is only in some sort an excrescence, it does not affect the prih it reatly increase their value and interest

In view of this definition, it may be asserted that architecture itself is one of the industrial arts The first duty of the constructor is towell fitted for the object it has to serve The house must afford a proper shelter for its inhabitants, the tomb must preserve the corpse entrusted to it from all chance of profanation, the temple must shi+eld the statue or the sylances, and afford convenient space for ritual celebrations These requirements may be fulfilled by edifices which have no pretensions to beauty With a roof and a certain number of naked walls, it is always possible to cover and enclose a given space, and to divide it into asin common with art Art steps in when the builder attempts to endow his ith that symmetry which does not exclude variety, with nobility of proportion, and with the charm of a decoration in which both painter and sculptor play their parts The constructor then gives place to the architect The latter, of course, always keeps the practical end in view, but it is not his sole preoccupation The house, as he builds it, has to respond to all the wants, intellectual as well as corporeal, of civilized man; the tonificent diive expression to the inexpressible, must symbolize the divine majesty to the eyes of men, and help to make it comprehensible by the crowds that come to sacrifice and pray

In all this, the _role_ played by art is so preponderant that it would be unjust to class architecture a the industrial arts The ambition of those who built the temple of Amen, at Karnak, or that of Athene, on the Acropolis, was to produce a hich should give faithful expression to the highest thoughts which the human mind can conceive In one sense, architecture reat compositions whose reements we endeavour with such care to re-establish, it was the architect who determined what part the painter and the sculptor should take in the work, who laid out for theh we shall not include architecture a the industrial arts, the distinction which we have established loses none of its practical ie, however, that there are certain classes of objects which lie upon the border-line between the two categories, so that we have so to fine or to industrial art The work of some Cellini of ancient times, or of your own day, eneral for the oldsmith or silversures executed in such a fashi+on that we are teorous and inflexible definitions have, in fact, to be confined to the exact sciences, such as geometry In the complexity of life, definitions and classifications can only be adhered to with a reservation They help the historian to find his way amid the infinite diversity of phenoe that they are far fro an absolute value They must be taken for what they are worth, simply as methods of exposition, as approxiha history of Egyptian industry We refer those who require an account of it to the voluminous work of Sir Gardner Wilkinson, where they will find abundant details upon the trades of Egypt and the materials which they e a few exaypt depended, in order to sho her artisans, like those of Greece, sought to give a certain amount of artistic value to every object that left their hands Forher branches of art are there again to be found When civilization is in its first infancy, and the plastic instinct just struggling into life, it is from those handicrafts which may be called elementary or primitive that art borrows its first combinations of line and colour But afterwards, when art has developed itself and created a style expressive of the national genius, the process is reversed, and the handicraftsman borrows in turn from the artist In our modern society the use of ulf between the work the ancients it was very different The workman was responsible for his work from inception to completion, and he expended upon it all the inventiveness, taste, and skill, that he possessed He was not the slave of a le object with inflexible regularity Every day he introduced, al it, some variation upon his work of the day before; his labour was a perpetual improvisation Under such conditions it is difficult to say where the artist began and where the handicraftsman left off In spite of the richness and subtlety of their idioes were unable to mark this distinction In Greek, as in Latin, there was but a single ternity

-- 2 _Glass and Pottery_

The potter's is, perhaps, the oldest of all the crafts A the relics of the cave-h pottery, shaped by the hand and dried either by the sun or in the neighbourhood of the doypt of the earliest dynasties was already more advanced than this The vases found in the mastabas show by their symmetrical shapes that the potter's wheel was already in use, and by their quality, that, although the Egyptians were content to dry their bricks in the sun, they fired their pottery in kilns and thoroughly understood the process[362]

[362] The oldest representation of the potter's wheel yet discovered is in one of the paintings at Beni-Hassan It is reproduced in BIRCH'S _Ancient Pottery_, p 14

Egypt afforded an abundant supply of excellent potter's earth, and her inhabitants, like those of ancient Greece and Italy, employed terra-cotta for purposes to which we should now apply glass, wood, or ood idea of the varied uses to which the material was put may be obtained from the early chapters of the work in which Dr Birch has traced the history of ancient pottery, with the help of numerous illustrations[363]

[363] S BIRCH, _A History of Ancient Pottery, Egyptian, assyrian, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman_, 1 vol 8vo, 1873 London, Murray

We shall not dwell upon common earthenware It is represented by numerous vessels from the most ancient tombs in the Memphite necropolis; they are of a reddish or yellowish colour, and, in spite of the absence of all glaze, they hold water perfectly well Like Greek vessels of the sa 291) Examples of coupled vessels, like those found in Cyprus, have also been discovered They coether by a co 292) Of all the representative speciiven by Lepsius, there is but one which does not seeory of doracefully orna circles[364] In later tilazed vases were decorated with the brush, but they were not remitted to the oven after that operation[365] The colour was therefore without lustre or solidity, and the designs were always very si the vases shaped in the forh inthat of the God Bes, is sketched in low relief upon a vase, and in a few instances a pair of s 293)

[364] LEPSIUS, _Denkmaeler_, part ii pl 153

[365] BIRCH, _Ancient Pottery_, p 37

[366] BIRCH, _Ancient Pottery_, Figs 23 and 25