Mitchell, Lucy M.: A history of ancient sculpture (New York, 1883)

PROPORTIONS OF THE HUMAN FORM. 67

unaffected in form : there is an attempted introduction of varied movement
and more graceful proportions, which, however, is seldom truly satisfactory ; as
it stops half-way.

With the close of the Thirtieth Dynasty we stand at the termination of
what was truly national and vigorous in Egyptian sculpture. Looking back,
we marvel at its realism at the outset, as in the earliest statues of Memphis;
at its boldness in rendering colossal forms, as seen in the works of Rameses;
and, finally, at the delicate and painstaking finish of this Sai'tic period. It is
difficult, in the world of ever-changing form and thought about us, to compre-
hend fully the Egyptians' feelings in holding so tenaciously through thousands
of years to the same modes of expression in sculpture. Some have sought an
explanation in a hieratic canon from which artists never swerved. From very
early times the Egyptian does not appear to have worked at bap-hazard, but to
have adopted a uniform scale of proportions, which rarely was altered, but
within its limits underwent many nuances of change. At first the standing
body, male or female, is divided into nineteen parts ; the unit taken being the
middle finger.9s The ancient Egyptian seems to have observed, that, as the
body grows, the bones of the hand are the only ones which grow in the same
proportion from infancy to age, and have constantly the same relation to the
whole frame. A seated figure occupied fifteen of the nineteen parts. In
the reliefs of the Ancient Empire, the upper part of the body occupies more
squares than it does in those of the Old Theban Empire. The forms are con-
sequently thicker and heavier; while the tendency is, as time goes on, to make
the legs longer, and the form more slender. With the Twenty-sixth Dynasty
we find that the form is divided into twenty-three parts from heel to summit of
head, or twenty-one and a quarter to top of forehead, seated figures occupying
nineteen of the twenty-three squares. This is, doubtless, the canon mentioned
by Diodoros.99 In it the form is about equally divided at the hips, and the
head is one-eighth of the whole,—a proportion which we find also employed by
the Greeks in their figiues of the heroic style. The great diversity of propor-
tion, however, existing between monuments of the same age, makes it difficult
to believe that for the master artist any rigid canon existed. Doubtless the
squares which mark off the form were used more to guide the copyists, of
whom thousands must have been employed. In the tomb of Seti I. the artist
altogether disdains the use of squares. In other reliefs they are clearly
simply used to facilitate the arrangement of the groups and hieroglyphics. On
a funereal stele in the British Museum from the Ancient Empire, the seated
figure of the upper row of reliefs occupies the same number of squares as the
standing ones below. Evidently, then, the similarity between monuments of
the same date may be due less to strict canon than to the prevailing taste
of the time. Thus, as we have seen in the Ancient Empire, stocky forms
preponderate ; in the Theban they are more slender ; and in the Twenty-sixth