CHAPTER I.
BLACK PROFILE PORTRAITURE: ITS PLACE IN ART, LITERATURE, AND SOCIAL LIFE.
Figures in black profile join hands round the wine-cups and oil-jars made by Etruscan potters; in silhouette men are armed to battle, women weave cloth and grind corn, children play at ball and knuckle-bones, life-like in shadow.
There is a pageant of profile portraiture on the mummy cases and frescoed tombs of ancient Egypt. Strange peoples are shown in outline as they lived; they go to war, they marry, their children play, the ritual of their Book of the Dead is pictured in profile three thousand years before the Christian era.
These flat and unsubstantial ghost figures come to us down the ages. From those mystic times when Crates of Sicyon, Philocles of Egypt, and Cleanthes of Corinth first worked in monochrome, there is an unbroken tale of men and women who have lived, loved, hated, and triumphed—Pharaohs and their slaves, Greek gods, and athletes; a French king, a murdered queen; Napoleon and his generals; statesmen and politicians; Goëthe, Beethoven, Burns, Wellington, Dickens, Washington, Harrison, Scott, and ten thousand others down to the present day. They come as colourless ghosts, relics of bygone men and women, shadows caught and held, while the realities have flitted across life’s stage and vanished.
Old Omar Khayâm, “King of the Wise,” in the twelfth century knew
“We are no other than a moving row
Of magic shadow shapes that come and go
Round with the sun, illumined lantern held
In midnight by the master of the show.”