Ancient Egyptian art is the painting, sculpture, architecture and other arts produced by the
civilization of Ancient Egypt in the lower Nile Valley from about 1000 BC to 100 AD.
Ancient Egyptian art reached a high level in painting and sculpture, and was both highly
stylized and symbolic.
Much of the surviving art comes from tombs and monuments and thus there is an emphasis
on life after death and the preservation of knowledge of the past.
In a more narrow sense, Ancient Egyptian art refers to the canonical 2nd and 3rd Dynasty
art developed in Egypt from 3000 BC and used until the 2nd century.
Most elements of Egyptian art remained remarkably stable over that 3,000 year period with relatively
little outside influence.
The quality of observation and execution started at a high level and remained near that level
throughout the period.
Portraiture in Ancient Egypt, above all of royalty, was highly developed, and represented
a complicated mixture of realistic depiction of individuals and stylization.
Periods Prehistoric
Early Dynastic Old Kingdom
Middle Kingdom New Kingdom, including the Amarna Period
Third Intermediate Period First Persian Period, Late Period and Second
Persian Period Ptolemaic Kingdom
Roman Egypt
Symbolism Symbolism also played an important role in
establishing a sense of order.
Symbolism, ranging from the pharaoh's regalia to the individual symbols of Egyptian gods
and goddesses, is omnipresent in Egyptian art.
Animals were usually also highly symbolic figures in Egyptian art.
Colours were more expressive rather than natural: red skin implied hard working tanned youth,
whereas yellow skin was used for women or middle-aged men who worked indoors; blue or
gold indicated divinity because of its unnatural appearance and association with precious materials;
the use of black for royal figures expressed the fertility of the Nile from which Egypt
was born.
Stereotypes were employed to indicate the geographical origins of foreigners
Hierarchical scale of portraying
The Size the people are drawn indicates often relative importance in the social order.
The king, or pharaoh, is usually the largest figure depicted to symbolize the ruler’s
superhuman powers.
Figures of high officials or tomb owner are usually smaller, and in smallest scale are
shown servants and entertainers, animals, trees, and architectural details.
Art forms Ancient Egyptian art forms are characterized
by regularity and detailed depiction of gods, human beings, heroic battles, and nature,
and a high proportion of surviving works were intended to provide solace and utility to
the deceased in the afterlife.
Artists endeavored to preserve everything from the present as clearly and permanently
as possible.
Ancient Egyptian art was created using media ranging from papyrus drawings to pictographs
and include funerary sculpture carved in relief and in the round from sandstone, quartz diorite
and granite.
Ancient Egyptian art displays an extraordinarily vivid representation of the Ancient Egyptian's
socioeconomic status and belief systems.
Egyptian art in all forms obeyed one law: the mode of representing Pharaohs, gods, man,
nature and the environment remained consistent for thousands of years.
Painting
All Egyptian reliefs were not painted, and less prestigious works in tombs, temples and
palaces were just painted on a flat surface.
Stone surfaces were prepared by whitewash, or if rough, a layer of coarse mud plaster,
with a smoother gesso layer above; some finer limestones could take paint directly.
Pigments were mostly mineral, chosen to withstand strong sunlight without fading.
The binding medium used in painting remains unclear: egg tempera and various gums and
resins have been suggested.
It is clear that true fresco, painted into a thin layer of wet plaster, was not used.
Instead the paint was applied to dried plaster, in what is called "fresco a secco" in Italian.
After painting, a varnish or resin was usually applied as a protective coating, and many
paintings with some exposure to the elements have survived remarkably well, although those
on fully exposed walls rarely have.
Small objects including wooden statuettes were often painted using similar techniques.
Many ancient Egyptian paintings have survived due to Egypt's extremely dry climate.
The paintings were often made with the intent of making a pleasant afterlife for the deceased.
The themes included journey through the afterworld or protective deities introducing the deceased
to the gods of the underworld.
Some tomb paintings show activities that the deceased were involved in when they were alive
and wished to carry on doing for eternity.
In the New Kingdom and later, the Book of the Dead was buried with the entombed person.
It was considered important for an introduction to the afterlife.
Egyptian paintings are painted in such a way to show a profile view and a side view of
the animal or person.
For example, the painting to the right shows the head from a profile view and the body
from a frontal view.
Their main colors were red, blue, black, gold,and black .
Sculpture
The monumental sculpture of Ancient Egypt is world-famous, but refined and delicate
small works exist in much greater numbers.
The Egyptians used the distinctive technique of sunk relief, which is well suited to very
bright sunlight.
The main figures in reliefs adhere to the same figure convention as in painting, with
parted legs and head shown from the side, but the torso from the front, and a standard
set of proportions making up the figure, using 18 "fists" to go from the ground to the hair-line
on the forehead.
This appears as early as the Narmer Palette from Dynasty I, but there as elsewhere the
convention is not used for minor figures shown engaged in some activity, such as the captives
and corpses.
Other conventions make statues of males darker than females ones.
Very conventionalized portrait statues appear from as early as Dynasty II, before 2,780
BC, and with the exception of the art of the Amarna period of Ahkenaten, and some other
periods such as Dynasty XII, the idealized features of rulers, like other Egyptian artistic
conventions, changed little until after the Greek conquest.
Egyptian pharaohs were always regarded as gods, but other deities are much less common
in large statues, except when they represent the pharaoh as another deity; however the
other deities are frequently shown in paintings and reliefs.
The famous row of four colossal statues outside the main temple at Abu Simbel each show Rameses
II, a typical scheme, though here exceptionally large.
Most larger sculpture survives from Egyptian temples or tombs; massive statues were built
to represent gods and pharaohs and their queens, usually for open areas in or outside temples.
The very early colossal Great Sphinx of Giza was never repeated, but avenues lined with
very large statues including sphinxes and other animals formed part of many temple complexes.
The most sacred cult image of a god in a temple, usually held in the naos, was in the form
of a relatively small boat or barque holding an image of the god, and apparently usually
in precious metal – none have survived.
By Dynasty IV at the latest the idea of the Ka statue was firmly established.
These were put in tombs as a resting place for the ka portion of the soul, and so we
have a good number of less conventionalized statues of well-off administrators and their
wives, many in wood as Egypt is one of the few places in the world where the climate
allows wood to survive over millennia, and many block statues.
The so-called reserve heads, plain hairless heads, are especially naturalistic, though
the extent to which there was real portraiture in Ancient Egypt is still debated.
Early tombs also contained small models of the slaves, animals, buildings and objects
such as boats necessary for the deceased to continue his lifestyle in the afterworld,
and later Ushabti figures.
However the great majority of wooden sculpture has been lost to decay, or probably used as
fuel.
Small figures of deities, or their animal personifications, are very common, and found
in popular materials such as pottery.
There were also large numbers of small carved objects, from figures of the gods to toys
and carved utensils.
Alabaster was often used for expensive versions of these; painted wood was the most common
material, and normal for the small models of animals, slaves and possessions placed
in tombs to provide for the afterlife.
Very strict conventions were followed while crafting statues and specific rules governed
appearance of every Egyptian god.
For example, the sky god was essentially to be represented with a falcon’s head, the
god of funeral rites was to be always shown with a jackal’s head.
Artistic works were ranked according to their compliance with these conventions, and the
conventions were followed so strictly that, over three thousand years, the appearance
of statues changed very little.
These conventions were intended to convey the timeless and non-aging quality of the
figure's ka.
Pottery
Ancient Egyptians used steatite and carved small pieces of vases, amulets, images of
deities, of animals and several other objects.
Ancient Egyptian artists also discovered the art of covering pottery with enamel.
Covering by enamel was also applied to some stone works.
Different types of pottery items were deposited in tombs of the dead.
Some such pottery items represented interior parts of the body, like the lungs, the liver
and smaller intestines, which were removed before embalming.
A large number of smaller objects in enamel pottery were also deposited with the dead.
It was customary to craft on the walls of the tombs cones of pottery, about six to ten
inches tall, on which were engraved or impressed legends relating to the dead occupants of
the tombs.
These cones usually contained the names of the deceased, their titles, offices which
they held, and some expressions appropriate to sex purposes.
Papyrus
Papyrus was used by ancient Egyptians for writing and painting.
Papyrus is relatively fragile, lasting at most a century or two in a library, and though
used all over the classical world has only survived when buried in the very dry conditions
of Egypt, and even then is often in poor condition.
Papyrus texts illustrate all dimensions of ancient Egyptian life and include literary,
religious, historical and administrative documents.
Amarna period
The Amarna period and the years before the pharaoh Akhenaten moved the capital there
in the late Eighteenth Dynasty form the most drastic interruption to the continuity of
style in the Old and New Kingdoms.
Amarna art is characterized by a sense of movement and activity in images, with figures
having raised heads, many figures overlapping and many scenes full and crowded.
As the new religion was a monotheistic worship of the sun, sacrifices and worship were apparently
conducted in open courtyards, and sunk relief decoration was widely used in these.
The human body is portrayed differently in the Amarna style than Egyptian art on the
whole.
For instance, many depictions of Akhenaten's body give him distinctly feminine qualities,
such as large hips, prominent breasts, and a larger stomach and thighs.
This is a divergence from the earlier Egyptian art which shows men with perfectly chiseled
bodies.
Faces are still shown exclusively in profile.
Not many buildings from this period have survived the ravages of later kings, partially as they
were constructed out of standard size blocks, known as Talatat, which were very easy to
remove and reuse.
Temples in Amarna, following the trend, did not follow traditional Egyptian customs and
were open, without ceilings, and had no closing doors.
In the generation after Akhenaten's death, artists reverted to their old styles.
There were still traces of this period's style in later art.
Related areas
Architecture
Ancient Egyptian architects used sun-dried and kiln-baked bricks, fine sandstone, limestone
and granite.
Architects carefully planned all their work.
The stones had to fit precisely together.
When creating the pyramids, ramps were used to allow workmen to move up as the height
of the construction grew.
When the top of the structure was completed, the artists decorated from the top down, removing
ramp sand as they went down.
Exterior walls of structures like the pyramids contained only a few small openings.
Hieroglyphic and pictorial carvings in brilliant colors were abundantly used to decorate Egyptian
structures, including many motifs, like the scarab, sacred beetle, the solar disk, and
the vulture.
Hieroglyphs
Hieroglyphs are the ancient Egyptian writing system in which pictures and symbols stand
for sounds and words.
Jean-Francois Champollion first decoded hieroglyphs from the Rosetta Stone, which was found in
1799.
Hieroglyphs have more than 700 symbols.
Notes
References Smith, W. Stevenson, and Simpson, William
Kelly.
The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt, 3rd edn. 1998, Yale University Press, ISBN
0300077475 External links
Ancient Egyptian Art – Aldokkan The Art of ancient Egypt
Senusret Collection: A well-annotated introduction to the arts of Egypt
Ancient Egyptian Art at the Cincinnati Art Museum