Week four Post: Egypt

Art History Blog for Week Four

Egyptian Art: Conventions and Creativity

The art of Egypt obeyed conventions that very often left the human body portrayed in a stiff, unrealistic manner.  The figures representing gods and rulers are larger than the others which follows notions of hierarchic scale and conveys the importance of the leaders.  It was discovered that the figures were laid down with a grid of squares as a guide with the proportions of the torso and legs to the shoulder occupying 16 squares of height, the shoulders themselves are six squares of width, the arms are seven squares long and the heads are three squares high.  The grid may have added to the stiffness of the figures though this canon of proportions was followed as an ideal in medieval art as well.  The conventions of Egyptian art also decreed that important people be posed so that their faces were in profile, except the eyes which were frontal.  Also, the torso was frontal but the hips, legs and feet were in profile.  Servants and animals would appear smaller and were often naturally depicted in realistic poses.   

What we think of as good art and what we regard as creative art are, or can be, two separate concepts.  The art of Egypt survived stylistically unchanged for thousands of years.  It was probably necessary for the artist to follow the conventions to work for rulers and priests when decorating tombs and temples.  Like the art of medieval churches, the path to the afterlife along with other religious and political concepts were drawn out in stylized, conventional ways to tell their stories to an illiterate population.  There is a restful beauty in art that obeys the conventions and styles that are current in an era.  We often prefer the familiar and in a stable society there may be no impetus to change.  This seems to be the case in Ancient Egypt.   Societies that supported scribes usually had low rates of literacy; the priests, scholars and some of the nobility were usually the only people able to read.  There is a lot of hieroglyphic writing in temples and tombs but there is no way of knowing if artists put it there or how much of it they understood.  Artists may have been among the priests, scholars, much like scribes, or they could have been slaves who were taught to write.

 It was within convention for Egyptian artists to be able to portray certain elements of their work naturalistically.  The creativity that they show is not so much in the figures they draw as it is in the composition of the areas of the work surrounding the main subjects.  Creativity means, at least to me, the ability to come up with something that hasn’t been done or seen before.  Following conventions, whether of realistic or unrealistic forms, isn’t as creative as being able to conceive of a completely new idea.  New ideas often aren’t considered to be art at first because people don’t understand the new forms.  In fact, it’s only when the new idea becomes established as a convention that it will be considered to be real art by most members of any society.  New modes shake people up and create or depict instability.  Creative or not, ancient art is still important to modern society because of the stories it tells. We have some answers to our questions about how ancient people were like and unlike us.   We know something about those who lived 4,000 years ago because of the art with which they decorated their monuments.