Why in the world did Egyptians paint like that? In any American high school there are a few talented people who can do a very credible job of drawing a human figure or face. Surely lots of Egyptians could also doodle a fair likeness. So why didn’t they?
Perhaps they did, but such images did not survive. Perhaps they could, but the style of the day was what it was. Perhaps drawing realistically never occurred to them.
What do you think?
They painted much more realistically than we modern artists do. They drew a foot in the orientation that gives the best possible depiction of a foot, and a torso in the orientation that gives the best possible depiction of a torso, and a head in the orientation that gives the best possible depiction of a head, and so on. Much better than modern artists, who insist on giving a poor angle for a head, just because that’s the way the subject’s head happened to be turned at that particular moment.
The surviving examples of their painting are almost all on stone and are profiles and mostly odd hand positions. But we do have examples of painting on the coffins. I believe that shows they had no issues painting portrait, but chose not to for 2 dimensional art or at least monumental art.
We have very few examples of textile art the little we have does vary from the monumental art we’re used to. So the odds are pretty good we’ve lost any other art styles they had.
Ok, draw a dog’s head. Now draw a cat’s head. Chances are, you drew the dog from the side and the cat from the front. Now draw a horse. You drew it from the side, not the front or rear. Now draw your hand. You drew it with all the fingers separated and extended. How often do you really see your hand that way? Now draw a picture of your house. You drew it from the front, not the side or back or from the top.
The Egyptians were no different than you; they captured the ESSENCE of whatever they were depicting, not the day-to-day random views they actually saw.
This Wikipedia entry has some information on the history of perspective, which I think is what you guys and gals are talking about:
The absence of perspective has a lot to do with it. It’s not so much that they didn’t “understand” visual perspective (although they probably did not) but the fact that their art was based on hieratic principles, where the communicative language of their art required the most important figures to be the largest and the most important details to be the ones emphasized.
Some Egyptian paintings are quite realistic. Example from the British Museum:
Looks like that’s one of the Fayum mummy portraits:
In terms of artistic tradition, the images clearly derive more from Greco-Roman artistic traditions than Egyptian ones.
In art, I much prefer stylized people to realistic ones.
We have a mural being painted in our neighborhood. I loved it as I watched it slowly develop from pencils to blocks of color to details… until yesterday. It looked like it was done, with people that were generalized, and weren’t specific people.
Then the artist started "over-working’ the people, adding age lines and shading and tons of little details to their faces.
Those poor people went from, well, looking like Seurat’s carefree people in the Saturday on the Grande Jatte, to depressed, wrinkly depression-era ‘Ashcan School’ portraits of coal miners. Or maybe they’re all Lucian Freud portraits.
So I vote to “Paint like an Egyptian”. (way-ooo, way-oooo…)
The Egyptians saved their realism for their sculpture.
A lot of the art was ritualistic. It was intended to serve their religion, and certain rules had to be followed. Look at Russian icons sometime, and you’ll see the same thing.
Much of Western art was the same way until the Renaissance, when the practice of perspective drawing and painting was developed. Figures were flat and not at all realistic.
Art is a field where the adherence to “realism” in any sense changes greatly over time. Historically, paintings tended to be much more stylized than sculpture. However, this is only a partial tendency rather than anything like rule. In addition, you have to consider the effects of a given medium - painting tends to turn more realistic when trying to capture portrait rather than depict a scene with numerous people, and most people weren’t painting on a clean canvas sheet, but were fitting images into books, or public decoration, or even illustrating a tomb.
For a reference, look at the Wikipedia page for Medieval art, which also covers a similarly long period of changing cultures. You’ll see a wide array of human representation.
I’m guessing it was a cultural thing. Look at Aztec art for example. They, too, had a cultural style as did many cultures. Egypt was not unique in this regard.
Because it looks cool. Duh!
This limestone bust is pretty good.
(Bust of Nefertiti, 1345 B.C.E.)
Yeah, a lot of people underestimate how hard it was to figure out perspective drawings, because we’re all so familiar with it these days.
But I recall once watching an artist friend of mine trying to explain it to another, non-artist friend. He was talking about drawing a picture of a big dinner we were at, with a group of people at a long table. But even with the actual event right there in front of us, the non-artist couldn’t quite wrap his head around how the artist was establishing perspective lines to keep everything in place.
Even if you are aware of perspective, getting it correct takes effort and skill. A lot of people probably figure it’s not worth the effort, if you’re not committed to realism in your art.
I seem to remember Jacob Bronowski devoting some time in The Ascent of Man to the development of perspective drawing during the Renaissance. It was a major milestone not just in art but in human consciousness as well
Heck, a lot of people who think they understand perspective don’t, either. For one thing, perspective lines aren’t actually straight.
Came here to post that too. It is so good that you could be excused if you suspected modern forgery. Ancient Egyptian art is as great as any art ever made. Don’t confuse realism with photography, that was not the point then and it is not now. Picasso and Kandinsky, to name but two famous artists, are not realists either, but great and inspiring nonetheless.
I wish I could be as good as the best Egyptian artists were. I am not.
Though note that was from the Roman period, which is not what most people think of when they think of “Ancient Egypt” (the Nefertiti bust linked above is separated from that painting by approx the same amount of time as it is from the modern day, give or take a century or two)
Not that Egypt didn’t influence Greece and Roman in the greco-roman period, as much as vice versa (Alexandria was the cultural center of the Greco-Roman world)
