The Origin of Statue Making
The art of imitating living forms by means of sculpture was no less ancient in Egypt than architecture.
Location: Egypt
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
“The Origin of Statue Making” from History of Art in Ancient Egypt by Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez, translated by Walter Armstrong, 1883.
The art of imitating living forms by means of sculpture was no less ancient in Egypt than architecture. We do not mean to say that it already existed in those remote ages when the first ancestors of the Egyptian people built their mud cabins upon the banks of the Nile; but as soon as their dwellings became something more than mere shelters and began to be affected by the desire for beauty, the figures of men and animals took a considerable place in their decoration. The oldest mastabas that have been discovered have bas-reliefs upon their walls and statues in their mummy-pits.
The existence of these statues and their relative perfection show that sculpture had advanced with strides no less rapid than those of the sister art It may even be said that its progress had been greater than that of architecture. Given the particular kind of expressive beauty which formed the ambition of the Egyptian sculptor, he produced masterpieces as early as the time of the Pyramid builders. We cannot say as much of the architect. The latter showed himself, indeed, a master in the mechanical processes of dressing and fixing stone, but the arrangement of his buildings was simple, we might say elementary, and many centuries had to pass before he had become capable of imagining and creating the sumptuous temples of the New Empire, with those ample porticos and great hypostyle halls which were the culminating achievements of Egyptian architecture.
In order to explain this curious inequality we need not inquire which of the two arts presents the fewest difficulties. It is with nations as with individuals. Some among them succeed with ease in matters which embarrass their neighbours. It is a question of circumstances, of natural qualifications, and of surroundings. Among the Egyptians the progress of sculpture was accelerated by that national belief in a posthumous life for the body which we have described in connection with their funerary architecture. By the existence of this constant and singular belief we may explain both the early maturity of Egyptian sculpture and the great originality of their most ancient style.
We have already described the arrangements which were necessary to enable the inhabitant of the tomb to resist annihilation. Those arrangements were of two kinds, a provision of food and drink, which had to be constantly renewed, either in fact or by the magic multiplication which followed prayer, and a permanent support for the ka or double, a support that should fill the place of the living body of which it had been deprived by dissolution. This support was afforded to some extent by the mummy; but the mummy was liable to be destroyed or to perish by the action of time. The Egyptians were led to provide against such a catastrophe by the invention of the funerary statue. In the climate of Egypt, stone, and even wood, had far better chances of duration than the most carefully embalmed body. Statues had the additional advantage that they could be multiplied at will. There was nothing to prevent ten, twenty, any number of them, being placed in a tomb. If but one of these images survived all the accidents of time, the double would be saved from that annihilation to which it would otherwise be condemned.
Working under the impulse of such an idea, the sculptor could not fail to do his best to endow his statue with the characteristic features of the original. "It is easy, then, to understand why those Egyptian statues which do not represent gods are always portraits of some individual, executed with all the precision of which the artists were capable. They were not ideal figures to which the desire for beauty of line and expression had much to say, they were stone bodies, bodies which had to reproduce all the individual contours of their flesh-and-blood originals. When the latter was ugly, its reproduction had to be ugly also, and ugly in the same way. If these principles were disregarded the double would be unable to find the support which was necessary to it.
The first Egyptian statue was not so much a work of art as a cast from nature. If photography had been invented in the time of Menes, photographers would have made their fortunes in Egypt Those sun-portraits, which are supposed to present a perfect resemblance, would have been put in the tomb of a deceased man in hundreds. Wanting such things, they were contented to copy his figure faithfully in stone or wood. His ordinary attitude, his features and costume, were imitated with such scrupulous sincerity that the serdabs were filled with faithful duplicates of himself. To obtain such a likeness the artist cannot have trusted to his memory. His employer must have sat before him, the stone body must have been executed in presence of him whose immortality it had to ensure. In no other way could those effigies have been produced whose iconic character is obvious at first sight, effigies to which a contemporary would have put a name without the slightest hesitation.
This individuality is not, however, equally well preserved in all Egyptian sculpture, a remark which applies to the early dynasties as well as to the later ones, though not in the same degree. In those early ages the beliefs which led the Egyptian to inclose duplicates of his own body in his last resting-place were more powerful over his spirit, and the artist had to exert himself to satisfy the requirements of his employers in the matter of fidelity. Again, those centuries had not to struggle against such an accumulation of precedents and fixed habits, in a word, against so much conventionality as those which came after. There were no formulae, sanctioned by long custom, to relieve the artist from the necessity for original thought and continual reference to nature; he was compelled to make himself acquainted both with the general features of his race and those of his individual employers. This necessity gave him the best possible training. Portraiture taken up with intelligence and practised with a passionate desire for truth has always been the best school for the formation of masters in the plastic arts.
In those early centuries, then, Egypt produced a few statues which were masterpieces of artistic expression, which were admirable portraits. In all countries, however, great works are rare. The sepulchral statues were far from being all equal in value to those of the Sheik-el-Beled, of Ra-Hotep from Meidoum, or of the scribe in the Louvre. This intelligent and scientific interpretation of nature was not reached at a bound; Egyptian sculpture had its archaic period as well as that of Greece.
Moreover, even when the art had come to maturity, there was, as in other countries a crowd of mediocre artists whose work was to be obtained at a cost smaller than that of the eminent men whom they surrounded. The leading sculptors were fully employed by the kings and great lords, by ministers and functionaries of high rank: their less able brethren worked for that great class of
functionaries of the second order, who composed what may be called the Egyptian middle class. It is probable too, that, although his work was to be hidden in the darkness of the serdab, the artist took more care in reproducing the features of a great personage whose appearance might be known from one end of the Nile valley to the other, than when employed by some comparatively humble individual. Before descending into the tomb, the statue must for a time have been open to inspection, and its creator must have had the chance of receiving those praises which neither poet nor artist has been able to do without, from the days of Memphis to those of Modern Europe.
In most cases, however, he had to reproduce the features and contours of some obscure but honest scribe, some insignificant unit among the thousands who served Cheops or Chephren; and his conscience was more easily satisfied. If we pass in review those limestone figures which are beginning to be comparatively common in our museums, we receive the impression that many among them bear only a general resemblance to their originals; they preserve the Egyptian type of feature, the individual marks of sex and age, the costume, the familiar attitude, and the attributes and accessories required by custom, and that is all. It may even be that, like a certain category of funerary steles among the Greeks of a later age, these inferior works were bought in shops ready carved and painted, and that the mere inscription of a name was supposed to give them that iconic character upon which so much depended.
A name indeed is not always found upon these images, but it is always carved upon the tombs in which they were placed, and its appearance there was sufficient to consecrate the statues and all other contents of the sepulchre to the support of the double to which it belonged. Whether it was copied from a sitter or bought ready-made, the statue became from the moment of its consecration an auxiliary body for the double. It preserved more of the appearance of life than the corpse saturated with mineral essences and hidden under countless bandages; the half-open smiling lips seemed about to speak, and the eyes, to which the employment of enamel and polished metal give a singular brilliance, seemed instinct with life.
The first statues produced by the Egyptians were sepulchral in character, and in the intentions both of those who made them and of those who gave the commissions, they were portraits, executed with such fidelity that the double should confidingly attach himself to them and not feel that he had been despoiled of his corporeal support. As the power and wealth of the Egyptians grew, their artistic aspirations grew also. They rose by degrees to the conception of an ideal, but even when they are most visibly aiming at grandeur of style the origin of their art may still be divined; in their happiest and most noble creations the persistent effect of their early habits of thought and belief is still to be surely traced.
Perrot, Georges, and Charles Chipiez. History of Art in Ancient Egypt. Translated by Walter Armstrong, Chapman and Hall, 1883.
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