Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/383

Caricature. 351 animals with wings. Egypt was the first to carry out this idea, and the winged figures which had a definite meaning when used in the tombs, came at last to be employed as mere decoration upon the industrial products which she exported through the Phoenicians. Fig. 277 comes from a royal tomb, and it shows how these winsed o-oddesses were sometimes combined with motives, which were either purely decorative or easily used tor decorative purposes. Like sphinxes and griffins, these composite forms amused the eye and were soon seized upon by the ornamentist, while their wings, which could be either closed or expanded, were useful for covering large spaces and helping to "furnish" the decoration. ^ 3. Caricature. We have shown the artists of ancient Egypt making naive and sincere transcripts of reality ; we have shown them, in their religious and historical scenes, inventing motives, creating types, and even aspiring to the ideal ; we have yet to show that the^^ understood fun and could enjoy a laugh. Without this last quality tljeir art would hardly be complete. In the royal tombs at Thebes we find a lion and a donkey singing to their own accompaniment on the harp and lyre respectively.^ This particular bent of the Egyptian artist is seen at its best, however, in a group of remains which are called the Satirical Papyri, and apparently date from the nineteenth dynasty. The Egyptians, like the Greeks after them, seem to have understood that sculpture properly speaking, the art that produces figures of large size from such materials as bronze and marble, does not lend itself to the provocation of laughter by the voluntary production of ugliness and deformity. They also perceived that such subjects were equally ill-adapted for wall paintings, whether in tombs or palaces. Among them, as among the Greeks, the grotesque was only allowed to appear where the forms were both very much smaller than life and considerably generalized. The designs traced with a light and airy hand upon such papyri as that of which the Turin Museum possesses an important fragment are examples of this treatment. The drawings in this papyrus are not caricatures as we now understand the word. Caricature is an exaggerated portrait ; it ^ John Kenrick, Ancient Egxpi itndn- the Pharaohs, vol. i. pp. 269. 270.