Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/357

The General Characteristics of the Egyptian Style. ^27 o-/ size, attitude, and expression, although in natural life there can haYe been no such distinction. Finally the Great Sphinx at Gizeh is sufficient to proYe that the Egyptians, in their endeaYour to make the great deities whom they had conceiYed Yisible to the eye, had attempted to create composite types of which the elements were indeed existent in nature, but separate and distinct. After the first renascence their imaginations played more freely. They multiplied the combinations under which their gods were personified. They transformed and idealized the human figure by the gigantic proportions which they gaYe to it in the seated statues of the king, and in those upright colossi in which the majesty of Pharaoh and the diYinity of Osiris are combined in one indiYidual. The sculptors portrayed the king in attitudes which had ncYer been seen by mortal eyes. Sometimes he is seated upon the knee of a goddess and drawing nourishment from her breast ; sometimes he bends, like a respectful and loYing son, before his father Amen, who blesses him, and seems by his gesture to conYey to him some of his own omnipotence and immortality. Again he is presented to us in the confusion of battle, towering so high aboYe his adYersaries that we can only wonder how they had the temerity to stand up against him. EYents hardly passed thus in those long and arduous campaigns against the Khetas and the People of the sea, in which more than one of the Theban Pharaohs spent their Hycs. Victory, when it was YictorY, was long and hotly disputed. Superiority of discipline and armament told at last and decided the contest in faYour of the Egyptians, who were inferior in strength and stature to most of their enemies, especially to those who came from Asia Minor and the Grecian islands. It is hardly just, therefore, to say, as has been said,^ that " Egyptian art had only one aim, the exact rendering of reality ; in it all qualities of obserYation are dcYeloped to their utmost capabilities, those of imagination are wanting." Egyptian art is not like the sensitized plate of the photographer. It does not confine itself to the faithful reproduction of the objects placed before it. Painters and sculptors were not content, as has been pretended, with the art that can be see;/, as opposed to the art that can be imagined, and an injustice is done to them by those who would confine the latter to the Aryan race. The apparent precision of such an assertion makes it all the more misleading. ^ E. Melchior de VoGrE. Chez hi Pharaons.