It is one of the greatest things in Egyptian art that all
the statues, paintings and architectural forms seem to fall
into place as if they obeyed one law. We call such a law,
which all creations of a people seem to obey, a “style”. The
rules which govern all Egyptian art give every individual
work the effect of poise and austere harmony.
The Egyptian style comprised a set of very strict laws,
which every artist had to learn from his earliest youth.
Seated statues had to have their hands on their knees; men
had to be painted with darker skin than women; the
appearance of every god was strictly laid down. Every artist
also had to learn the art of beautiful script. He had to cut the
images and symbols of the hieroglyphs clearly and
accurately in stone. But once he had mastered all these rules
he had finished his apprenticeship. No one wanted anything
different, no one asked him to be “original”. On the
contrary, he was probably considered the best artist who
could make his statues most like the admired monuments of
the past. So it happened that in the course of three thousand
years or more art changed very little. Everything that was
considered good and beautiful in the age of the pyramids
was held to be just as excellent a thousand years later.
Granted, new fashions appeared, and new subjects were
demanded of the artists, but their mode of representing man
and nature remained essentially the same.
Only one man ever shook the iron bars of the Egyptian
style. He was a king of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Amenophis
IV, a heretic. He broke with many of the customs hallowed
by age-old tradition. He did not wish to pay homage to the
many strangely shaped gods of his people. For him only one
god was supreme, Aten, whom he worshipped and whom he
had represented in the shape of the sun-disk sending down
its rays, each one endowed with a hand. He called himself
Akhnaten, after his god, and he moved his court out of reach
of the priests of the other gods.
The pictures that he commissioned must have shocked
the Egyptians of his day by their novel character. In them
none of the solemn and rigid dignity of the earlier Pharaohs
was to be found. Instead, he had himself depicted lifting his
daughter on to his knee, walking with his wife Nefertiti in
the garden, leaning on a stick, beneath the blessing sun.
Some of his portraits show him as an ugly man; perhaps he
wanted the artists to portray him in all his human frailty.
Akhnaten’s successor was Tutankhamun, whose tomb with
its treasures was discovered in 1922. Some of these works
are still in the modern style of the Aten religion. The back of
the king’s throne shows the king and queen in a homely
idyll. He is sitting on his chair in an attitude which might
have appalled the strict conservative – almost lolling, by
Egyptian standards. His wife is no smaller than he is, and
gently puts her hand on his shoulder while the Sun-god
again is stretching his hands in blessing down to them.