Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [38]
Speaking of Djedefre, whose pyramid at Abu Roash is a right mess, he may have picked a different site for religious reasons. That’s always a safe theory.
Despite a thousand generations of tomb robbers, some precious objects from the Old Kingdom have survived—because they were not precious to the robbers. These are the works of art with which the tombs were furnished: offering tablets and statues and, in later tombs, painted wall reliefs. To the Egyptian, beauty was not its own excuse for being; his art had a very practical purpose, for it served the vital business of survival. Painted and carved reliefs supplied the dead man, magically, with all the objects he might require in the future life, and pictured the activities he hoped to enjoy. The full-length statues and busts were emergency equipment, in case the carefully preserved body did not survive.
Still, an artist may serve a pragmatic aim without losing sight of the beautiful. The Egyptian style of painting looks strange to someone who is accustomed to our notions of perspective; the human form, for instance, is always shown with the head in profile, eyes and shoulders in front view, and the rest of the body in profile again. The Egyptians did not work in this way because they could not draw a face in front view; behind their technique was a concept of the universe that made visual impressions unimportant. They did not care what something looked like, but what it was like, and they worked out a way of expressing the essential qualities of objects that satisfied them so thoroughly that they continued to use it for three thousand years. The rules governing painting and sculpture were set early in the game, probably by the end of the Third Dynasty, and are so strict that archaeologists refer to them as the Canon. They were never written out, but they were exemplified in every major work of art the Egyptian artist produced, as the Greek Polyclitus exemplified his own canon in the magnificent male figure called “The Doryphorus.”
For a nonspecialist, Egyptian sculpture is easier to enjoy than is Egyptian painting, since it was subjected to none of the radical distortions of two-dimensional art. The sculpture of the Old Kingdom is often quite stunning. Like the architecture, it is dignified, austere, and stately; like the architecture, it creates an unforgettable impression. It was equaled in later periods but never really surpassed; in fact, it was never surpassed in any time or any nation until Phidias of Athens took chisel in hand and showed his pupils how to make the white marble move and breathe.
It is hard to photograph statuary properly, and few of the photographs of Egyptian sculptures do them justice. One must see them to appreciate them fully. A number of museums in various countries managed to acquire magnificent examples during the period before the Egyptian government clamped down on exporting antiquities—the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in the United States, to mention only a few. Naturally the greatest collection is in the Cairo Museum. Here sits Khafre, enthroned, with the protective wings of the divine falcon enfolding his head, facing eternity with inhuman calm and confidence; nowhere else, perhaps, has the notion of divine kingship been expressed so concisely in a human face. Here too are such lesser folks as the noble Rahotep, with his neat little Clark Gable mustache, and his buxom wife Nefret. These last two statues are life-size and vividly painted; the eyes are inlaid