The Lady Nophret (Cairo Museum)
I confess that when I drew near to these statues in the Museum at Cairo, it is no exaggeration to say that I was literally startled by their lifelike appearance. Like Miss Jane Harrison, I felt that the "Lady Nophret," at least, must be able to rise and come forward,[67] so ridiculously fresh and warm did she appear in her spotless white dress and her majestic wig. I soon realized that I was in the presence of a kind of realism which transcended anything I had ever seen in ancient or modern art, for its convincingness and truth; and it was difficult to believe that this piece of wholesale deception—certainly more perfect than any waxwork figure I had ever known,—like the statue of the Man-God Khephrën, was a product of the pyramid period.
You must not gather, from what I have just said, that the Lady Nophret is in the slightest degree as vulgar or as commonplace as an ordinary waxwork figure or modern portrait. Though its vitality cannot be denied,[68] there are artistic qualities in the simple moulding of the figure which place it very much higher than the realistic work either of ancient Greece or of modern Europe. It is only beside the statue of King Khephrën that it appears so weak; and, as it is almost a contemporary of this magnificent person, the manner in which it has been presented to us by the artist seems to be a problem.
The first lesson it teaches you is this—that whatever you may think about the conventionalism of King Khephrën, such conventionalism has nothing whatever to do with archaic clumsiness, inability to see Nature, or incompetence. It is clear that the Egyptians were greater masters in rendering nature realistically than any people before or after them.[69] If they had not been, they could never have produced the portrait-statues of the architect Ti; the two portrait-statues of Ranofir, priest of Ptah of Memphis, and that of the Scribe and of the Cheikh-el-Beled[70]—all in the museum at Cairo.
When they are not realistic, then, it is because they do not wish to be; it is because they deliberately desire to rise above nature, to transfigure it, simplify it, and arrange it—in fact, to be artists.
What, then, was the object of these realistic portrait-statues about which I have chosen to speak collectively in my references to the Lady Nophret?
They were never intended by the artist who made them to be seen by the eye of man. They were never intended to be works of Ruler-art, set up to emphasize and underline the values of a people. They had a definite purpose, of course, but this purpose was quite foreign to that of Art as I defined it in my last lecture. What was this purpose?