Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/331

The Principal Conventions in Egyptian Sculpture. 301 off, even when it represents figures in motion. A support in the shape of a cohimn at the back is nearly always introduced ; the arms are held close to the sides ; a huge head-dress often enframes the head and hangs down upon the shoulders in two equal masses ; a long and narrow beard springs from under the chin and lies upon the chest. Freedom and variety of attitude is equally absent from the seated statues. The knees are brought together and the hands supported upon them. We never find an arm raised, a hand opened as if to give force to speech, or a leg stretched out to relieve the stiffness of the lines. There is no striving for that suppleness of limb and variety of pose which the Greeks contrived to obtain ev^en in their Iconic figures. The face is often full of animation and individual vitality, the modelling of the trunk and limbs marvellously true and broad, but the body as a whole is too symmetrical in action and entirely without abandon. The natural movements which spring from ease and liberty are never employed. Forced and conventional attitudes are universal. A reason for this has been sought in the supremacy of the sacerdotal caste. The priests, we are told, must soon have adopted such a type, or rather several varieties of such a type, as seemed to them expressive of their own ideas of man when deified by death, of the king as the son of the gods, of the gods themselves as the protectors of the Egyptian race. They imposed the perpetuation and constant reproduction of this type upon artists as a sacred duty, and thus the Egyptian style was hieratic in its origin and essence. Such an assertion is easily made. Hio'atic is one of those convenient adjectives whose vagueness discourages critical examination. What evidence is there that ancient Egypt was ever a theocracy, in the proper sense of the word } Only once, during so many centuries, did the Egyptian priests attempt to encroach upon the privileges of the king. Towards the close of the twentieth dynasty the prophets of Amen, at Thebes, tried hard to substitute their own authority for that of the last of the Rameses,^ but the success of their usurpation was very shordived. In Ethiopia alone, among a people much less highly civilized, sacerdotalism seems to have acquired an uncontested pre-eminence. In Egypt the king was always the first of the ' Maspero, Histoire Aiicietine, p. 272.