EGYPTIAN ART (31,000 B.C.-30 B.C.) Egypt's impact on later cultures was immense. You could say that Egypt provided the building blocks for Greek and Roman culture, and, through them, influenced all of the Western tradition. Today, Egyptian imagery, concepts, and perspectives are found everywhere; you will find them in architectural forms, on money, and in our day-to-day lives. Egyptian artists made art mainly for the elite patrons of a society that was extremely hierarchical. Many of the best known and most evocative works of Egyptian art were made for these powerful rulers. Royal art expresses the multifaceted ways that the king was envisioned: as a human manifestation of gods, as a god in his own right, as beneficent ruler, and as emblem of life itself. Royal projects for the afterlife dominated the Egyptian landscape and provided the model for all elite burials. Because the kings commissioned some of Egypt’s most impressive tombs, the imagery of kinship intersected with the imagery of the afterlife in powerful ways. Timeline Period of Egyptian Art

1. The Early Dynastic Period 2. The Old Kingdom (2575-2134BCE) 3. The Middle Kingdom (2040-1640 BCE) 4. The New Kingdom (1550-1070BCE)

Egyptian Art Characteristics

• Strong sense of order • Head, hips, legs and feet always in profile • Eyes, shoulders and upper torso seen from front • Use of Hierarchic scale (the use of relative size to indicate the comparative

importance of depicted objects or people.) • Heavily influenced by everyday life, especially religion and life after death • The subject’s head always drawn in profile with the full eye shown • Balanced forms and compositions, clear outlines, simplified shapes and flat

areas of colour wee used to create order and clarity • Colours had a symbolic meaning

Blue + Green= water, the Nile and vegetation Yellow + Gold = the sun and God Red + Orange=desert, power, blood and vitality

The Old Kingdom: Dynasties 3-6 The Old Kingdom is the name given to the period in the 3rd millennium BC when Egypt attained its first continuous peak of civilization – the first of three so-called "Kingdom" periods, which mark the high points of civilization in the lower Nile Valley. The old kingdom endures for five centuries. Artists followed a formula for representing idealized human figures according to an evolving set of proportions. And since Egyptians believed that ka or life force of an individual lived on the grave, embalmers went to great lengths to preserve the body for eternity after death. The Pyramids Egypt the land of pyramids, tell us that the kings were so rich and powerful that they could force thousands of workers or slaves to toil for them year in year out to quarry the stones to drag them to the building site, and to shift them with the most primitive mean till the tomb was ready to receive he king. The king was considered a divine being who held sway over them, and on his departure from this earth he would again ascend to the gods whence he had come. The pyramids soaring up to the sky would probably help him to make his ascent. In any

ThreeThousandYearstheRomeConqueredEgyptin30B.C.

case they would preserve his sacred body from decay. For the Egyptians believed that the body must be preserved if the soul is to live on in the beyond. That is why they prevented the corpse from decaying by an elaborate method of embalming it, and binding it up in strips of cloth. It was for the mummy of the king that the pyramid had been piled up and his body was laid right in the centre of the huge mountain of stone in a stone coffin.

• Out of tradition the first known major funerary complex emerges that of the Third Dynasty King Djoser at Saqqaara. Other kings followed Djoser’s lead, but during the Fourth Dynasty funerary architecture changed dramatically.

• The most obvious change is the shift from a step pyramid to a smooth-sided one.

• The best known pyramids are the three Great Pyramids at Giza built in commemoration of Sneferu’s son, Khufu (the first and largest pyramid), Khafra (a moderately smaller pyramid), and Menkaure (the smallest pyramid)

But it is not only these oldest relics of human architecture, which tell of the role played by age old beliefs in the story of art. The Egyptians held the belief that the preservation of the body was not enough. If the likeness of the king was also preserved, it was doubly sure that he would continue to exist forever. So they ordered sculptors to chisel the king’s head out of hard granite and put in the tomb where no one saw I, there to work its spell and to help his soul to keep alive in and through the image. Some of these early portraits from the pyramid age, the fourth ‘dynasty’ of the ‘Old Kingdom’, are among the most beautiful works of Egyptian art. For example in Portrait head c. 2551-2528 Found in tomb at Giza, limestone

• There is solemnity and simplicity about them, which one does not easily forget.

• One sees that sculptor was not trying to flatter his sitter or to preserve a fleeting expression. He was concerned only with the essentials. Perhaps it is just because of this strict concentration on the basic form of the human head that the portraits remain so impressive.

• For despite, their almost geometrical rigidity they are not primitive. The observation of nature and the

Step Pyramid of King Djoser, Saqqara 3rd Dynast ca.2681-2662 BCE

The Pyramids at Giza

regularity of the whole are so evenly balance that they impress us as being lifelike and yet remote and enduring.

The combination of geometric regularity and keen observation of nature is characteristic of all Egyptian art. Representing the Human Figure: Egyptian Reliefs and Paintings Reliefs and paintings, which were found in the walls of the tombs, were not intended to be enjoyed. It had been a custom when a powerful man died to let his servants and slave accompany him into the grave. They were sacrificed so that he should arrive in the beyond with a suitable train. Later, these horrors were considered either too cruel or too costly, and art came to the rescue. Instead of real servants, the great ones of this earth were given images as substitutes. The pictures and models found in Egyptian tombs were connected with the idea of providing the soul with helpmates in the other world, a belief that is found in many early cultures. To us these reliefs and wall paintings provide an extraordinary vivid picture life as it was lived in Egypt, as it was the artist task to preserve everything as clearly and permanently as possible. So they did not set out to sketch nature as it appeared to them, instead they drew from memory according to strict rules which ensure that everything that had to go into the picture would stand out in perfect clarity. Their method resembled that of a mapmaker for example in The Garden of Nebamun shows it in a simple example, representing a garden with a pond. The shape and character of the trees could be seen clearly only from the sides; the shape of the pond would be visible only if seen from above. The Egyptians had no compunction about the problem, they would simply draw the pond as if it was seen from above and the trees form the side. The fish and birds in the pond would hardly look recognizable as seen from above so they were drawn in profile. The Garden of Nebamun, c. 1400 BC Wall painting from a tomb in Thebes

Portrait of Hesire, from a wooden door in his tomb, c.2778-2723 BC, Museum Cairo

• In the Portrait of Hesire, the head was mostly seen in

profile so they drew it sideways, only a full-face eye was planted into the side view of the face.

• The top half of the body, the shoulders and chest, are bet seen from the front for then we see how the arms are hinged to the body

• Arms and legs are in movement are much more clearly seen sideways.

• That is the reason why Egyptians in these pictures look so strangely flat and contoured.

• They merely followed a rule, which allowed them to include everything in the human form that they considered important.