Art: Secret Garden

To most people, the vast geometry of the pyramids and the Great Sphinx’s weather-blunted face are all that loom above the mist surrounding Egyptian art. For those who cared to look deeper, U.S. bookstores last week were peddling a thin volume of brilliant photographs titled Egyptian Art (Golden Griffin; $8). Along with its pictures, the book boasted a running commentary by Etienne Drioton, a French priest and scholar who is also director of the Cairo Museum’s Department of Egyptian Antiques.

Naked Majesty. Egyptian art, Drioton says, is “a secret garden.” His text lucidly describes a few of its finest flowers.

At the bottom of the garden, nearly 3,000 years before the birth of Christ, Egyptians of the “Old Kingdom” produced temples and sculptures that their successors could never surpass. As an example of the earliest and best in Egyptian art, Drioton picks a statue of King Khephren, the man who built the Great Sphinx. Except for the falcon of the royal ancestor-god Horus, which perches like a thought behind King Khephren’s head, the portrait shows none of the symbolic attributes of royalty. “And yet,” Drioton says, “such is the majesty emanating from this statue of an almost naked man that it is impossible . . . not to feel ourselves in the presence of a king.” Such works set a style that outlasted the pharaohs themselves.

Westerners are apt to prefer the lively grace of Greek art to the detachment and restraint of the Egyptian, but some Greeks preferred the Nile product. “Long ago,” wrote Plato in the Laws, the Egyptians recognized that “their young citizens must be habituated to forms and strains of virtue. These they fixed, and exhibited the patterns of them in their temples; and no … artist is allowed to innovate upon them . . .” Plato exaggerated.

Egyptian art conventions did change over the centuries, though most of the modifications were so slight as to be almost imperceptible to the artists who made them. Slowly, Drioton says, “the sublime grandeur of the royal faces . . . gave way to a more human ideal of majesty mixed with a certain good-natured simplicity.”

Distended Stomach. Moreover, there were innovators such as King Akhnaton, who came to the throne about 1370 B.C. He demanded that his trembling sculptors carve him as he really looked: “Elongated head, gaunt face, slender limbs, distended stomach—no detail of this kind was spared … On the contrary everything that was wrong from that aesthetic point of view was exaggerated, just like those modern works which strike the imagination while shocking established opinion.”

Akhnaton’s reform died with him because the next pharaoh, Tutankhamen (“King Tut”), preferred flattery. The statues done of him have what Drioton calls “a delicate prettiness with sometimes a touch of romantic melancholy.” Since the gods were customarily carved to resemble the reigning monarch, sculptors had to make them beautiful and blue, too. It got so that animals were the only subjects artists could treat freely.

Near Smile. About 1000 B.C., court artists tried to set the clock back to old King Khephren’s time. The new sculptures went back only part way. “They never indeed recaptured the old robust vigor and naturalness,” Drioton says. They had “a softness, almost a smile, which links them with the archaic Greek sculpture whose contemporaries they were.” A seated scribe looking for all the world like a modern businessman on a holiday at the beach was one of the period’s best products.

Alexander I the Great scotched Egyptian art by opening Egypt to the Greeks. Yet the tradition, which had lived so long, was also a long time dying. Under the Ptolemies, and even during the early years of Roman domination, the work of Egyptian sculptors “was still pharaonic art, made more interesting by a restrained exoticism.” But, says Drioton sadly, the day came “when sculptors . . . tried to treat the drapery of the toga like the costume of the pharaohs . . . When Egyptian sculpture reached this point, it could only disappear.”