Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/373

The Figure. 341 painted bas-reliefs of the temples ; we have every reason to believe it accurate.^ The plate which faces page 334 is a faithful repro- duction of a fraofment in the Louvre. It comes from a Theban tomb, and shows the elegance and refinement of the contours which the painter had to fill up. The colour has faded, but the most interesting point in all these pictures is the outline, in which alone real artistic talent and inv-entive power are displayed. Finally, our Plates III. and IV., drawn and coloured from notes and sketches made upon the spot by M. Bourgoin, represent the polychromatic decoration of the Ancient Empire as it was left by those who decorated the tomb of Ptah-hotep. In this case at least we know that we possess the true value of the tones brought together by the artist, for the mastaba in question is one of those which the desert sands have most completely preserved. The Figure. In the mastabas colours are applied to figures in relief. It is not till we reach the first Theban Empire, in the tombs at Beni- Hassan, that we find real paintings in which the brush alone has been used. Fig. 265 — Painting at Beni-Has.=an. Champollicn, pi. 374. We have already described the style and character of the paintings at Beni- Hassan. In most cases the outlines prepared for the painter do not differ from those meant for the sculptor. 1 The materials for this plate were borrowed from the Description de FEgypte. In the complete copies of that work the plates were coloured by hand, with extreme care, after those fine water-colours the most important of which are now in the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibliotheque Nationale. The colours thus applied are far nearer the truth than those of the chromo-lithographs in more modern publications.