Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/205

The Origin of Statue-making. i8i nations as with individuals. Some among them succeed with ease in matters which embarrass their neighbours. It is a question of circumstances, of natural qualifications, and of surroundings. Among the Egyptians the progress of sculpture was accelerated by that national belief in a posthumous life for the body which we have described in connection with their funerary architecture. By the existence of this constant and singular belief we may explain both the early maturity of Egyptian sculpture and the great originality of their most ancient style. We have already described the arrangements which were necessary to enable the inhabitant of the tomb to resist annihila- tion. Those arrangements were of two kinds, a provision of food and drink, which had to be constantly renewed, either in fact or by the magic multiplication which followed prayer, and a permanent support for the ka or double, a support that should fill the place of the living body of which it had been deprived by dissolution. This support was afforded to some extent by the mummy ; but the mummy was liable to be destroyed or to perish by the action of time. The Egyptians were led to provide against such a catastrophe by the invention of the funerary statue. In the climate of Egypt, stone, and even wood, had far better chances of duration than the most carefully embalmed body. Statues had the additional advantage that they could be multiplied at will. There was nothing to prevent ten, twenty, any number of them, being placed in a tomb.^ If but one of these images survived all the accidents of time, the dojtble would be saved from that annihilation to which it would otherwise be condemned. Working under the impulse of such an idea, the sculptor could not fail to do his best to endow his statue with the characteristic features of the original. "It is easy, then, to understand why those Egyptian statues which do not represent gods are always portraits of some individual, executed with all the precision of which the artists were capable. They were not ideal figures to which the desire for beauty of line and expression had much to say, they were stone bodies, bodies which had to reproduce all the individual contours of their flesh-and-blood originals. When the latter was ugly, its reproduction had to be ugly also, and ugly in ^ The serdabs of the tomb of Ti contained twenty, only one of which was recovered uninjured. Mariette, AW/Vf du Miisce de Boulak, No. 24.