A History of Art in Ancient Egypt, Vol. 2 (of 2)

by Georges Perrot; Charles Chipiez

PAINTING.

§ 1. Technical Processes.

Most of our observations upon Egyptian sculpture are applicable to the sister art of painting. The conventions which form the characteristic originality of the Egyptian style were established by the sculptor; but when the artist had to draw the outline of a form, and to fill it in with colour instead of cutting it upon the naked surface of the wall, the difference of process did not affect his method of comprehending and interpreting his models. We find the same qualities and the same defects. The purity of line, the nobility of pose, the draughtsmanship at once just and broad, the ignorance of perspective, and the constant repetition of traditional attitudes are found in both methods. Painting, in fact, never became an independent and self-sufficing art in Egypt. It was commonly used to complete sculpturesque effects, and it never freed itself from this subordination. It never attempted to make use of its own peculiar resources for the expression of those things which sculpture could not compass—the depths of space, the recession of planes, the varieties of hue which passion spreads over the human countenance, and the nature and intensity of the feelings which are thus betrayed. We may say that it is only by some abuse of terms that we can speak of Egyptian painting at all. No people have spread more colour upon stone and wood than the Egyptians; none have had a more true instinct for colour harmony; but yet they never attempted to express, by the gradation of tone, by the juxtaposition or superposition of tints, the real aspects of the surfaces which present themselves to our eyes, aspects which are unceasingly modified by the amount of light or shadow, by distance and the state of the atmosphere. They had not the least glimmering of what we call chiaroscuro or of aerial perspective.

Their painting rests upon conventions as audacious as those of their sculpture. In it every surface has an uniform and decided value though in nature everything is shaded. A nude figure is all one colour—dark for a man, light for a woman. A drapery has but one tone, the artist never seeming to trouble himself whether it be in light or shadow, or partly in one partly in the other. In a few plates in Lepsius, and still more in Prisse,[327] there are suggestions that an artist here and there, more skilful than his rivals, understood that values differed, and distinguished in his more careful work between colour in shadow and colour in light. One or two contours appear to hint at the rotundity of chiaroscuro. In accepting such a suggestion, however, we should be making a mistake against which we have been warned even by such early travellers as the authors of the Description.[328] The effects in question must be placed to the credit of the sculptor. The images in which they appear are painted bas-reliefs, and the slight shadow thrown by their salient grounds gives an appearance of half-tint to their contours. Wherever pictures are without relief there is no such appearance, and yet changes of value would in them be more useful than elsewhere.

To place unbroken colours in juxtaposition to each other without transitions is to illuminate; it is not painting in the true sense of the word, and its practitioner is an artisan rather than an artist. The artist is he who traces the design upon the walls, who, chalk in hand, sketches the forms of men and women and the lines of the ornament. Many of these sketches are admirable for the freedom and breadth of their outline. The portrait of Amenophis III. which is to be seen in his tomb in the Bab-el-Molouk is a good example of these master-studies (Fig. [263]). When nothing interfered to prevent the completion of the work, the painter came with his palette and brushes to spread colour over the spaces enclosed by these lines. Nothing could be easier than his task. He was only required to lay his colours smoothly, and to avoid overpassing the boundaries laid down for him. The hues of the flesh and of the draperies were fixed in advance as well as those of the various objects which were repeatedly introduced in such works.

Fig. 263.—Outline for a portrait of Amenophis III. Champollion, pl. 232.

At Beni-Hassan, and in several of the Theban tombs, there are representations of the painter at work. When he had to spread a single tint over a large surface—brown, for instance, upon the whole superficies of a limestone statue—we see him seated upon a kind of stool, his pot of colour in his left hand, his brush in his unsupported right (Fig. [54] Vol. I.). Sometimes his work was more complicated than this. There are a few royal portraits, and a few scenes with numerous actors, in which the whole scale of tints at his command must have been required. He then makes use of a palette. Specimens of these palettes are to be seen in every museum. They are rectangular pieces of wood, of alabaster, or of enamelled earthenware. They usually have seven little colour cups, but a few have as many as eleven or twelve. Small styles, as large as a crow-quill, have been found with these palettes. The use of these has been much discussed. Prisse cut one and steeped it in water. It was then discovered that the reed of which it was composed became a brush when its fibres were thus softened by moisture.[329] None of the large brushes which must have been used to spread the colour over considerable surfaces have been discovered, but Prisse believes that they too must have been made of fibrous reeds, such as the sarmentose stems of the Salvadora persica. Others think that for such purposes the hair pencil must have been employed.

Cakes of colour have sometimes been found in the tombs, together with earthenware mortars and pestles for grinding them. The tints usually employed were yellow, red, blue, green, brown, white, and black. These correspond to the seven cups hollowed in most of the palettes. They each included several varieties. Some of these colours were vegetable, such as indigo; others—and these more numerous—were mineral. Among the latter is a certain blue, which has preserved all its brilliancy even after so many centuries. Its merits were extolled by Theophrastus and Vitruvius. It is an ash with wonderful power of resisting chemical agents, and neither turning green nor black with exposure to the air. It must have been composed, we are told, of sand, copper-filings, and subcarbonate of soda reduced to powder and burnt in an oven. Copper is also the colouring principle, at least in our days, of those greens which are more or less olive in tone. Different shades of red, yellow, and brown, were obtained from the ochres. Their whites, formed of lime, of plaster, or of powdered enamel, have sometimes preserved a snowy whiteness beside which our whitest papers seem grey.[330] As for violet, Champollion tells us that no colour used by the ancients had that value. In those few bas-reliefs in which it is now found, it is a result of the changes which time has spread over surfaces originally gilded. The hue in question is caused, we are told, by the mordant or other preparation upon which the gold was laid.[331]