THE LADY TOUÎ, STATUETTE IN WOOD.
The Louvre.
The statuette that represents her may deservedly rank as one of the best works which have recently emerged from Theban soil. She stands upright in the hieratical attitude of repose, one foot in advance, the head fixed, the right arm hanging by her side, the left arm across the chest, holding the sacred whip, the monaît, folded up. She wears the ceremonial costume, a long robe with sleeves, narrow, crossed in front, edged with a heavy, stiff fringe, a broad necklace round the neck; on her head the immense wig fashionable among the Thebans in the eleventh and tenth centuries B.C., numerous little tresses gathered together at the ends into two or three, and finished off with tassels or little curls. The effect was fairly ugly: it lent heaviness to the top of the figure, diminished the size of the face, cramped the neck, concealed the fall of the shoulders and the rise of the breasts, broke the equilibrium of the body. But the anonymous artist who made the portrait of the lady Touî has derived an almost fortunate advantage from this deplorable head-dress: he has treated it as a sort of background which sets off the face, neck, and chest. The lateral tufts of hair frame the features without making them too heavy, and the close-fitting coif at the top is placed on the skull without appearing to crush it. The slender, healthy forms of the body are rendered in remarkable fashion, and the modelling of the belly and legs shows itself under the clinging stuff with a precision that is in no way brutal. In looking at it we certainly recognize more than one defect: the figure lacks suppleness and the face expression; the wood is cut harshly and with an almost puerile detail. The whole, however, pleases by some indescribable simple and chaste charm: the Louvre was perfectly right to acquire it, even if more money was expended than is usual on Egyptian objects of such small size.
Its use is easy to determine; it is a miniature statue of the double shut up in the tombs of the Memphian period. A statue was not within the reach of everybody: only the rich could procure one, and people of moderate means were obliged to content themselves with little figures of less cost. The population of priests, servants, singing-girls, heads of the works who lived round the sanctuary of Amon or in the temples of the necropolis, had many pretensions to luxury with slender resources: their tombs are filled with objects which pretend to be what they are not, and veritably deceive the eye, destined to give the dead the illusion of opulence; massive wooden vases painted to represent alabaster or granite vases, rings and jewels in glass or enamel that appear to be gold rings and jewels, furniture in common wood, varnished, speckled, veined, to simulate furniture in rare woods. The lady Touî belonged to that half-needy class, and had to substitute statuettes of carved and polished wood for limestone or sandstone statues. All the museums in Europe have similar ones, and through Champollion, the Louvre possessed the lady Naî,[86] who sustains comparison very well with her new comrade. Egyptian sculptors had acquired veritable mastery in this subordinate form of sculpture, and there are pieces of singular charm among those that have reached us. Take, for instance, the little girl and the woman I have chosen almost at hazard in one of the cases of the Turin Museum. The little girl is standing, one foot in advance, the arms hanging down, naked according to the custom of Egyptian children, with a necklace, and a belt which loosely surrounds the loins, short plaited hair with a tress falling over the ears. The material is less precious than with the lady Touî, and the work less thorough, but has the slim delicacy of a little Egyptian girl of eight or ten years old ever been better expressed? It is an exact portrait, in costume and figure, of the little Nubian girls of the Cataract before the age of puberty obliges them to wear clothes; it is their thin chest, slender hips, clearly cut, delicate thigh, their bearing, hesitating and bold at the same time, the roguish expression of their features.
STATUETTE IN WOOD.
Turin Museum.
STATUETTE IN WOOD.
Turin Museum.