Art with a job to do
Most of what we call Egyptian art was never meant to be looked at for pleasure. Statues stood in temples and tombs, often sealed in rooms nobody entered. Reliefs and paintings covered walls in the dark. Their purpose was practical. A statue in a tomb could house the spirit of the dead person; an offering painted on a wall could feed it forever if the real food ran out; a scene of the king defeating his enemies kept chaos away from Egypt.
The Egyptian word for sculptor tells you a lot. It was s-ankh, “the one who makes live”. If an image was going to work for eternity, it had to be complete and clear, and it had to be recognisable to the gods. That is why Egyptian artists cared more about showing things correctly than about showing them as they look from one spot at one moment.
Why do the figures stand sideways?
Look at almost any Egyptian figure and you will see the same combination: head in profile, eye seen from the front, shoulders from the front, waist turning, legs and feet in profile. It is called composite view, and it is not a failure to draw. Each part is shown from the angle that describes it best. A nose is clearest in profile, an eye from the front, two shoulders only make sense when you see both. The figure is a sum of the most informative views, like a diagram rather than a photograph.
The same logic decides size. In hierarchical scale the most important person is the biggest: the king is larger than his soldiers, a tomb owner larger than his wife and servants, a god often larger than the king. Scenes are arranged in registers, that is, horizontal bands stacked one above the other, each standing on its own ground line, so a wall can be read in strips like a comic.
A grid of squares
To keep figures consistent, artists drew them on a grid. For a standing figure in the Old and Middle Kingdoms, the grid ran 18 squares from the soles of the feet to the hairline, with the knees, waist and shoulders on fixed lines. In the Late Period, from about the seventh century BCE, the grid changed to 21 squares up to the eyes. A draughtsman could enlarge a sketch onto a wall square by square, and teams could work on the same wall without their figures coming out different. Some unfinished tombs still show the red grid under the figures, which is how we know.
The grid is one reason Egyptian art can look repetitive to us. It is also why a figure carved under Ramesses II has almost the same proportions as one carved fifteen hundred years earlier.
Materials chosen for eternity
Egyptian artists chose materials for what they meant as well as for how they worked. Hard stones like granite and quartzite, almost impossible to wear away, went into royal statues and colossi. Fine limestone took delicate relief. Gold, which never tarnishes, was the flesh of the gods, which is why Tutankhamun’s gold mask shows the young king with a face that cannot decay. Colours were ground from minerals: red and yellow ochre, black from soot, white from gypsum or chalk, and Egyptian blue, an artificial pigment made by heating sand, copper and lime, one of the first synthetic colours in history. You can see how they were used in the wall paintings of the tombs.
Colours and symbols had meanings too. Green was growth and rebirth, black the fertile mud of the Nile and so also life, red could be energy or danger. Small signs carried whole ideas: the ankh for life, the scarab for rebirth, the Eye of Horus for protection and healing.
Did it never change?
It changed more than it seems, but always inside the same rules. Old Kingdom statues, like the Seated Scribe in the Louvre, have calm, full faces and an almost startling presence, helped by eyes inlaid with rock crystal. Some Middle Kingdom kings were shown with tired, lined faces. New Kingdom painting became lighter and more elegant, with transparent linen and lively animals.
The one real break came under Akhenaten (reigned about 1353-1336 BCE), who worshipped a single sun god, the Aten, and moved the capital to Amarna. His artists showed the royal family with long faces, heavy hips and thin limbs, kissing their children and playing with them, scenes never seen before. The bust of his queen Nefertiti, found in 1912 in the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose, comes from this moment. After Akhenaten’s death the old style returned, and the rules went on, through Greek and Roman rule, until the last temples closed.
Where to see it
The Egyptian Museum in Cairo and the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza hold the largest collections, including the Palette of Narmer and the treasures of Tutankhamun. Outside Egypt, the British Museum in London has the paintings of Nebamun, the Louvre in Paris the Seated Scribe, and the Neues Museum in Berlin the bust of Nefertiti. In Egypt itself, the tombs and temples of Luxor show how these images worked in their original setting.
Sources
- G. Robins, The Art of Ancient Egypt (revised ed. 2008) and Proportion and Style in Ancient Egyptian Art (1994).
- UCL, Digital Egypt for Universities, “Grids in Egyptian art”.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Art of Ancient Egypt: A Resource for Educators.
- Musée du Louvre, “The Seated Scribe” (E 3023).
- British Museum, “The Nebamun tomb paintings”.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Egyptian art and architecture”.
