Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/22

A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. he insists upon giving it two ears, because when he looks at a front face he sees two ears standing out beyond either cheek. In these days when we wish to represent an architectural building exhaustively, we do it in geometrical fashion, giving plans, elevations^ and sections. To get a plan we make a horizontal section at any determined height, which gives us the thickness of the walls and the area of the spaces which they inclose. An elevation shows us one of the faces of the building in all its details, while the transverse or longitudinal section allows us to lay the whole of the structural arrangements open to the spectator. Plan, elevation, and section, are three different things by the comparison of which a just idea of the whole building and of the connection of its various parts may be formed. The Egyptians seem to have had a dim perception of these three separate processes, but they failed to distinguish clearly between them, and in their paintings they employed them in the most naive fashion, combining all three into one figure without any clear indication of the points of junction. Let us take as an example a representation of a house from a Theban tomb (Fig. i), and attempt to discover what the artist meant to show us. In the left-hand part of the picture there is no difficulty. In the lower stage we see the external door by which the inclosure surrounding the house is entered ; in the two upper divisions there are the trees and climbing plants of the garden. It is when we turn to the house, which occupies two- thirds of the field, that our embarrassments begin. The following explanation is perhaps the best — that, with an artistic license which is not rare in such works, the painter has shown us all the four sides of the building at once. He has spread them out, one after the other, on the wall which he had to decorate. This process may be compared to our method of flattening upon a plane surface the figures which surround a Greek vase, but in modern works of archaeology it is customary to give a sketch of the real form beside the flat projection. No such help is given by the Egyptian painter and we are forced to conjecture the shapes of his buildings as best we can. In this case he was attempting to represent an oblong building. The door by which the procession defiling across the garden is about to enter, is in one of the narrow sides. It is inclosed by the two high shafts between which a woman seems to be awaitinor on the threshold