Art: Bridge from Antiquity

The Egyptian civilization that was greater, for nearly two thousand years, than anything before it, was almost spent by the first millennium B.C. The empire was shattered. The legacy of cultural greatness from the days of Ramses II was running out. Egypt was slowly overcome by an ennui that made her powerless to stop the conquering hordes of Libyans, Ethiopians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and Romans, who swept into the Nile Valley like a rampaging flood. But foreign domination for a time pumped new vigor into Egypt’s tired blood. Sculptors gradually began to escape from the sterility of pyramid sculpture and, subjected to freshening outside influences, introduced a new vitality and plasticity into their own work that suggested the classical sculpture of their Greek conquerors. This week the Brooklyn Museum is gathering 141 pieces of this hybrid Late Period (700 B.C. to 100 A.D.) work, assembled from 55 public and private collections, for the Oct. 18 opening of the most comprehensive exhibition of late Egyptian sculpture ever shown.

In earlier periods of Egyptian civilization, stone images of human beings were destined mainly for the tomb, and they were given a benign and introspective expression suitable for the spirit world. But in the Late Period, sculpture was intended for the temple and was meant to be seen by worshipers. Late Period sculptors tried to endow their statues with features that reflected the character and inner life of a specific person. The face of the Woman in Ecstasy (see color) is suffused with bliss as she tilts her vividly sculptured head upward, her eyes wide and her lips parted. Such sensuality is condemned as decadent by many Egyptian classicists. Yet this sculpture has an inherent vibrancy. The youth in the Dattari Statue combines the old and the changing civilizations. Beyond the hint of a smile, his face has been idealized without much individuality. But his body has a supple quality far different from the slablike torsos of the sculpture of the earlier dynasties.

Though Egyptian sculptors borrowed esthetic ideas freely from their conquerors, they added their own craftsmanlike touches, which had been passed down through 2,000 years of Egyptian civilization. Artisans eschewed the hard-tipped metal tools used by foreign sculptors, pounded away at the quarry rock with stone cutting tools, polished the finished work with quartz sand. Details such as the echeloned curls, sinuous eyebrows, and almond-shaped eyes of the Girl with a Late Period Bob were painstakingly sculpted. So perfect was the technique of these artisans that even today no modern steel cutting tool can achieve the same sable smoothness on hard stone.

Upright Late Period statues are generally backed by a pillar that rises from the base to shoulder, neck or head level. The pillar serves no functional purpose; it does not support the statue but follows the contours of the figure as if it intruded into or grew out of the person represented. Its rear plane is flat and is frequently covered with columns of symbols. Yet some scholars suggest that the shaft is perhaps the most essential part of a Late Period statue, because it is the seat of the Ka, or vital force, thought to endow the subject with divine power.

As recently as 20 years ago, Egyptologists scorned Late Period sculpture as a bastardization of the classical standards of the dynastic tradition. Of late many are discovering that the Late Period, though a fusing of styles, has a grace and strength of its own.