Art: SCRIBES OF OUTLINES

Nowadays, artists switch styles as often as their wives change hairdos. But things were slower in Egypt. For 3,000 years, Egyptian artists respected the same old rules. Egypt’s painters apparently learned theirs from papyrus scrolls which depicted almost everything they might be commissioned to produce. Art was mostly a matter of faithful copying; those who learned the trade became “scribes of outlines.” But the painters who adorned Egypt’s tombs had a bit more freedom than her sculptors and architects.

One liberty, which in itself amounted to a convention, was to leave a picture or two in each tomb unfinished. Another was to depict wildlife just as it looks. Third, and most important, there was an occasional flicker of human interest. A farm boy giving up his donkey to the tax collector might be shown pouting; a queen playing chess might assume a mysterious smile; a bureaucrat might be counting on his fingers.

Such details help make Egyptian tomb painting easy for moderns to take. It presents a surprisingly vivid picture of what life in ancient Egypt was like, but color reproductions have been hard to find. A lavishly illustrated book out next week, Egyptian Painting (Skira; $20), will give many readers their first close-up view of the subject. The book concentrates on the necropolis hewn from the hills west of Thebes during the New Kingdom (circa 1500-1100 B.C.). There, over 400 mausoleums deep inside the rock show scenes from the lives of the dead, and of the eternal life they hoped to achieve.

Paintings of the afterlife are minimized in the volume, says Author Arpag Mekhitarian, partly because “our modern sensibility is allergic to these half-human, half-animal beings . . . whose greenish skins signify at once the decomposition of the corpse and the rebirth of vegetable life.” From the Garden of Ialu (bottom, opposite), the book reproduces only the fraction which shows a man plowing and might be an earthly scene. Actually, Ialu was a forerunner of the Greek Islands of the Blessed. The whole picture shows the souls of a man and wife eternally sowing and reaping and worshiping their gods forever.

Rather than such splendid but esoteric scenes, Egyptian Painting’s editors chose scores of details which are like peeks into the everyday world of numberless days ago. As the pictures show, hunting, fishing, farming, brickmaking, butchering, carpentering, dancing, drinking, feasting and mourning were essentially the same then as now.

A few of the paintings are masterpieces which bear out a dictum of the sage Ptahhotep (see hieroglyphics below): “No limit may be set to art …” The majority, however, for all their historical interest, are either stereotyped or clumsy, and illustrate the second half of Ptahhotep’s saying: “. . . Neither is there any craftsman that is fully master of his craft.”