Painting and Sculpture

The Art of Ancient Egypt

Strictly followed by ALL Egyptian artists

Every part of the body shown from most familiar point of viewHead, arms, feet, legs always shown in

profileEyes and shoulders always shown from

the front.

Paintings and sculptures = substitutes for the body

Rules of Egyptian Art

The Great Sphinx at Giza

The head: Pharaoh

(4th dynasty Khafre)

The body: reclining lion

65 feet high

Old Kingdom Carved from

rock onsite

Portrait of Khafre

Quietly aloof = symbol of eternal strength & power

Falcon (Horus, god of the sky) behind head = Khafre’s divinity (descendent of Re, the sun god.)

NO ONE questioned divine power and authority

Middle Kingdom; rare

Fragment of portrait of King Sesostris III

Expressive facial features

Authority depended on personality, strength and cleverness

Portrait of a Middle Kingdom Ruler

Portrait of Akhenaton Realistic Heavy lips,

long slender neck, elongated head, pointed chin

Not solemn or stiff;

Shown in common everyday scenes

Most artwork after his death continued this tradition

Methethy with Daughter and Son

Relief Sculpture

Head, arms, legs, and feet in profile

Shoulders and eye as seen from the front

Body correctly proportioned

Grew as an art form during Middle Kingdom

Process:Walls of cliff tombs smoothed over

with coating of plasterHorizontal and vertical straight lines

drawnFigures and animals arranged along

the lines to tell a storyPictures colored with red and yellow

hues, with black and blue-green added for contrast

No shading

Painting

Nakht and His Wife

Early form of picture writing Symbols represented objects and

sounds Included in wall paintings and other

art forms to tell story from a lifeSymbols spaced to form attractive

patterns…extremely importantNo vowels, only consonants.No punctuation or spacing.

Hieroglyphics

Over 700 symbols representing actual words

Thousands symbols used for individual sounds

Written both vertically in rows and horizontally in columns.

No empty spaces. When human and animal glyphs face

to the right, the text should be read from right to left. Conversely, when the glyphs face left, the text should be read left to right.

Hieroglyphics (cont.)

Hieroglyphs could be written left to right.

But they were usually written right to left.

 

Ideograms: used to write the words they represented.

Numbering system based on units of 10. Used different images to represent different units

of 10.

100,000

10,000 1,000 100 10 1

Ramses Cartouche

Cartouche: picture writing used to create a pictogram

Alphabet

Painting on the wall = the priest’s ka to pass through in search of offerings

False Door Stela (fig. 7.14)