The usual posture did not lend itself to elegance. They are nearly all crouching, the thighs up to the chest, the arms crossed on the knees: what advantage was to be obtained from an attitude that reduced a man to a mere packet surmounted by a head? Where the model departed from the hieratical posture, the qualities of the school are revealed. The Ankhnasnofiriabrê en Hathor has a somewhat strained gracefulness: it would almost bear comparison with the Amenertaîous so much admired by Mariette, if it were not leaning against a big ugly pillar. Perhaps the contrast between the slender waist and the inflated bust and belly is too marked in the Ankhnas, but the composition of the head is irreproachable. It is nearly always so at that epoch: if the sculptors sometimes neglected the bodies or interpreted them ill, they cared lovingly for the heads. Fine portraits may be counted by the score among the statues found in the favissa. I shall only give two here, that of Mantimehê and his son, Nsiphtah, who lived under Taharkou and Psammetichus I. Thebes was then under a curious government. When the male descendants of the priests failed, the power, and those sacerdotal functions that could be exercised by women, passed into the hands of the princesses: one of them was elected, who, wedded to the god in a mystic marriage, henceforth enjoyed the right of living free as she pleased. To assist them in the government, these pallacides of Amon had major-domos, who often filled with them a similar rôle to that of the chief minister with the queens of Madagascar before the occupation of the island by the French. Mantimehê and his son are the best known of these persons, and the artists to whom the care of sculpturing their portraits was entrusted would certainly be the best among those of the sacerdotal studio. It is, in fact, nature itself, and no master of a former age could have expressed better or with a bolder chisel the bustling vulgarity of the father and the aristocratic inanity of the son. The second Saïte period and the beginning of the Greek period are almost entirely unrepresented in the favissa; under the Persians, distress was too general for artistic matters to be thought of, and the Macedonian rule had only just been consolidated when the common pit was dug. A granite head, of hasty workmanship but dignified appearance, shows, however, that the Theban studio followed the movement that prevailed in the schools of Lower Egypt, and that, doubtless under the influence of Greek models, it gave attention to details hitherto neglected: the skull is studied with a greater care for accuracy, and also the slight accidents of the physiognomy, the furrows of the forehead, the lines between the eyes and at the rise of the nose, the falling in or puffing out of the cheeks, the play of the muscles round the nostrils and mouth. The sculptor desired to note in his work not only the broad lines of the face, but the small details that characterize the individual and determine his personality.
OSORKON II OFFERING A BOAT TO THE GOD AMON.
QUEEN ANKHNASNOFIRIABRÊ.
MANTIMEHÊ.
NSIPHTAH, SON OF MANTIMEHÊ.
