How Art Made the World

by Nigel Spivey

  23 View of the ceiling and walls of the Tomb of Pharaoh Rameses VI, in the Valley of the Kings, near Luxor, c.1140 BC.

  There is no shortage of images of the human body in Egyptian art. In some painted regal tombs, such as that of Rameses VI in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor (Fig. 23), there are literally thousands of bodily images covering ceilings and walls. Descending into such a densely decorated space, one is immediately struck by its layered and patterned intricacy.The multiple hieroglyphs emphasize that effect, but so too do the bodies. Many are linked in registers, repeated as if in procession. But even when depicted in some particular gesture or action, these bodies are remarkably alike.Where some are unusual in size and shape, they do not represent ordinary mortals, but rather the pharaoh and certain associated deities, which in Egyptian religion are often zoomorphic – taking the form of animals.The rest appear almost to have been stencilled on the surface.Their proportions look identical, their repertoire of movement strikingly limited. Heads are mostly in profile, but with eyes shown front-on. Shoulders are frontal too, making arms, hands and fingers fully visible. But backsides, legs and feet are all depicted sideways. Each body is a predictable amalgamation of distinctive parts.The effect is one of orderly array. Even the pharaoh’s enemies – a set of decapitated prisoners still kneeling with their hands tied behind their backs – have become a fixed motif.

  Faced with such regular and repeated images, any search for the signs of peak shift here would seem to be somewhat irrelevant.True, aspects of the body have been simplified, and one could argue that such simplification involves selectivity. But these Egyptian bodies are not rendered unrealistic by exaggeration.They part with reality because they are schematic and conceptual.

  ‘Schematic’ means that these images belong to a plan, a preconceived arrangement. As such, there are no signs of individuality among the thousands of humans depicted in this tomb; their effect comes from replication and quantity. ‘Conceptual’ means something else besides. It refers to the thinking process by which the image was generated.The artists who used this image of the body were not concerned with the actual appearance of a human being, but something more like a dictionary definition (‘Two legs, two arms, stands upright, etc.’).The shape of the body in Egyptian art was in this sense determined not by any direct observation – certainly not a life class – but rather a mental image.

  This schematic and conceptual image, once established, was enshrined as virtually changeless; a divine gift that would be spoiled by any deviation from the norm.There was just one notorious interlude in Egyptian dynastic history when the ‘heretic’ king called Akhenaten (1353–1335 BC) abruptly broke with convention, creating a new administrative centre at the site of Amarna and presiding over new styles of painting and sculpture. But this was a short-lived revolution. So to outside observers, one of the most amazing traits of Egyptian art remains its formal consistency over some 3000 years. In fact, Egypt’s iconographic stability was noted long ago – early in the fourth century BC – by the Greek philosopher Plato. Plato admired how the Egyptians had codified music with kala schemata (rightful rules), and approved a similar level of central control in the visual arts. ‘If you go to Egypt and examine their paintings and reliefs, you’ll find that work done 10,000 years ago – I mean it, literally – is no different from that of today.The artistry is just the same.’ (Plato, Laws 656d) Plato has over-emphasized the timespan, but his impression would still be widely shared.The question then arises: how did the Egyptian artists achieve such steady, invariable results?

  There is no surviving account from Egyptian sources about laws and customs governing the output of art.The finished products point to some prevalent method for maintaining relative proportions over a range of scale that ran from the miniature to the colossal. More clues, however, are to be found in work that was not finished.

  A telling example of one such incomplete project is to be found in one of the several hundred known burial sites on the west bank of the Nile by Thebes (modern Luxor). This is the tomb-chapel of Ramose, who was governor of Thebes at the time (c. 1350 BC) when Akhenaten caused political and religious upheaval in Egypt. Not only was Ramose wealthy enough to commission a grandiose, pillared resting-place for himself, but he also had a useful family connection: his brother was chief of works at the royal capital of Memphis to the north. Outstanding craftsmen were evidently summoned to decorate the space with shallow reliefs and paintings. But, perhaps because of the abrupt change in regime, the tomb of Ramose at Thebes was left slightly unfinished.

  The telltale marks are a number of fine red lines.These lines were evidently applied by dipping a length of string in red paint, stretching it taut by the tomb wall, and then twanging it against the plaster surface.Their purpose is clear enough. Regular horizontal and vertical spacings make up a grid on which images of the body were superimposed (Fig. 24).

  24 (above) An unfinished relief in the Tomb of Ramose, at Gurna, near Luxor, c.1350 BC, with the grid still apparent.

  25 (above right) A detail of a figure in the Tomb of Tausert, in the Valley of the Kings, near Luxor, 12th century BC. Again the preliminary guidelines for the figure remain visible.

  Traces of similar guidelines have been found on other painted walls in Egypt (Fig. 25). And, of course, the grid can be retrospectively tried for size wherever images of the body occur. Sure enough, a pattern emerges: figures shall be 19 squares tall … two squares are allowed for the face … the pupil of the eye shall be placed in one square off the central axis … ten squares are allowed from the neck to the knees, and six from the knees to the soles of the feet … the feet shall be two and a half squares in length – and so on.The absolute dimensions of the grid may shift over time, and some artists were less fastidious than others in keeping to the squares. But the principle of mapping figures by grids was generally established in Egyptian painting by c. 2000 BC, and the same principle applied to the making of statues, too – a network of lines etched on four sides of a block due to be carved into a human form. Discriminations of relative quality are not excluded by this system, but little is left to chance or artistic caprice.

  The Egyptians, then, did not so much exaggerate their images of the human body as make a virtue of its sameness and predictability. It may be significant that the so-called Amarna period of Akhenaten’s rule was marked by immediate signs of emphasis and distortion in pictures and statues, as if freedom to follow the peak-shift instinct had been suddenly indulged – though in fact the grid system was just altered, not banished (Fig. 26). But the methodical practices of the Egyptians – not only in painting and carving, but also in quarrying, dressing and transporting enormous blocks of stone – would exert a great influence upon the subsequent history of art in Europe and the West. It came through Egypt’s connections with a people who can fairly be described as obsessed with the human body, in both art and life: the ancient Greeks.

  EGYPT’S GIFT TO GREECE

  The Egyptians – as noted, and well known – worshipped certain animals. Cats, crocodiles, cows – these were among the many creatures held in veneration, as they were, or incorporated into the nature of particular gods or goddesses. In the eyes of their Mediterranean neighbours, the Greeks, this zoomorphism seemed peculiar and fantastic, for the Greeks took quite a different view of divine manifestation.The Greeks were firmly and exclusively attached to the dogma of anthropomorphism – the belief that deities took human shape.

  ‘Like a man in the bloom of his youth, lithe and powerful, with long hair streaming over his broad shoulders … ’ – this was how one Greek god, Apollo, was invoked in a chorus composed c. 700 BC.The first known poets of archaic Greece, Hesiod and Homer, readily envisaged the sun god Apollo and other supernatural powers not only assuming human shape, but even speaking and behaving in all too human ways.When Greeks went to the temples and sanctuaries deemed as the houses and precincts of these deities, it was in the expectation of encountering the divine presence. Apollo might be able to move ‘s
wift as a thought’, yet the idea of offering a prayer to an empty room was, for the Greeks, no less strange than bowing down before a hippopotamus. If Apollo was there, it ought to be possible to see him: to focus attention on some substantial image that matched the poetic invocation of the god.

  This expectation put pressure upon Greek artists – sculptors, especially – to produce cult images. If that phrase evokes effigies veiled in smoke and incense, or jostled shoulder-high in loud processions, it may not be exact for the discreet idolatry enjoyed by Apollo and his fellow deities, for whom the quiet inner sanctum of a Greek temple was usually reserved, with sacrifices in honour of the god conducted at an altar outside. Nevertheless, pilgrims hoped to glimpse some semblance of the divine in residence, as it were. Such an image must be, above all, credible: as much a medium as a representation of supernatural power. In other words, Greek gods were not merely supposed to take human form; they should act the part, too – look lively with it.

  The primary problem for Greek sculptors was one of size. Prior to the late seventh century BC, their work – mostly in clay and solid-cast bronze – remained small scale. There may have been some larger efforts using wood, but these have not survived. Excavations of Greek sanctuaries in their early phases – notably Olympia, where tradition has it that the athletic festival of the Olympic Games was founded in 776 BC – indicate a prolific use of figurines, but little more than figurines, fashioned in a simple geometric style. At Delphi, the mountainous site frequented by devotees who hoped to hear the very voice of Apollo, images of the god – or of those who sought his oracle – were made mostly in miniature (Fig. 27).

  The technical leap to life size and over is unlikely to have come independently. But because the Greeks themselves did not like to admit external factors in the development of their art (preferring the invention of stories around a fabulously ingenious craftsman, Daidalos, to explain how various arts and crafts were born), we are forced to search for indirect clues. Fortunately, the Greeks’ own ‘father of history’, Herodotus, has left us just the sort of detail we require. Herodotus compiled his Histories (‘Inquiries’) in the mid-fifth century BC; and, being the inquisitive sort, he devoted a considerable section of his work to an exotic place he had visited and sought earnestly to understand – Egypt. In the course of reporting his own impressions of Egypt’s remarkable monuments – including the pyramids at Giza, near modern Cairo – Herodotus tells us about how the Greeks first became acquainted with Egypt.There was, he relates, a certain exiled claimant to the Egyptian throne called Psammetichus.This Psammetichus received a prediction that he would gain power with help from mysterious ‘men of bronze, arriving by sea’. Shortly afterwards, a number of Greek sailors – clad in bronze armour – were forced to disembark on Egypt’s coast. Psammetichus promptly hired them as mercenaries, won control of the country, and then rewarded his Greek supporters with rights of residence and trade in the Nile delta. So, as Herodotus concludes, it was from the time of Pharaoh Psammetichus I, who came to power in 664 BC, that Greeks and Egyptians began to interact as never before (Histories 2.154). Can it be sheer coincidence that within a decade or so the first large-scale stone statues began to appear in Greece?

  The circumstantial evidence for some exchange of artistic know-how is compelling. Commemorative images of pharaohs, scribes and other important individuals in the Egyptian hierarchy were widely on view to any traveller down the Nile (Fig. 28). In stance and attitude, these Egyptian monuments offered an impressive and exemplary model to Greek sculptors.The earliest Greek efforts at the full-sized male figures seem to copy from Egypt the striding left leg, and the clenched fists held at the side (Fig. 29). There are differences, of course, the most obvious being the Greek preference for nudity. But it looks likely that the stonemasonry skills that the Egyptians had practised for centuries were, during the second half of the seventh century, passed on to the Greeks. Tools, measuring devices, quarrying techniques and logistics of transport all belonged to Egypt’s store of intellectual property.

  The Greeks took what they needed.They had plentiful sources of marble, a stone just as dense and durable as Egyptian granite. More significantly, they had their own motives for undertaking the laborious task of cutting big blocks of marble and moving them around. Greek religion was like a bargain.The more you gave to the gods, the more you could expect by way of favours in return.Therefore, the presentation of a large and costly work of art in a hallowed place was a very good investment. Add to this the popular demand for lifelikeness, and it soon becomes clear why Greek sculptors so eagerly used Egyptian expertise to move from statuettes to statues. It also goes some way to accounting for the stylistic ‘miracle’ that ensued.

  26 (left) A statue, probably of Queen Nefertiti (wife of Akhenaten), and probably from Amarna, c.1345 BC. Akhenaten’s rule was marked by dramatically non-canonical art.

  27 (above) A miniature bronze votive statuette from Delphi, c.630 BC.

  28 A colossal statue of Rameses II, at Luxor Temple, c.1400 BC.

  29 A kouros figure from Melos, c.600 BC, clearly similar in stance to earlier Egyptian statues.

  THE GREEK REVOLUTION

  The Greeks may have borrowed heavily from Egypt in order to arrive at their first full-sized, free-standing figures. But the schematic principles of Egyptian practice were not transplanted. On the contrary: instead of working from grids and fixed mental images, Greek artists turned directly to the actual or intended subjects of their representation. Of course, not all these objects were visible.The poets could weave tales about many-headed monsters, but illustrating them remained a task for the imagination. But the gods on high, the heroes of the past, and contemporary patrons all shared the same essential form – that of the human body.To represent such subjects, to create a virtual reality with art, required Greek artists to depart from convention and use their eyes. So they did.

  The Greek kouroi, the upright young men shown as if stepping forward, and smiling in their eagerness to advance, may truly be said – stylistically – never to stand still. At first, their bodies are mapped into basic patterns, with little regard for anatomical accuracy. But almost immediately there is development towards realism. Ears begin to look like ears, not curious curved objects attached to the side of the head. Instead of showing the upper body as a triangle containing certain ridges and grooves, sculptors began to locate clavicles and shoulder blades, abdomens and backbones. Each decade of this generic statue type – once thought to represent the god Apollo, but now understood to stand for any aristocratic would-be hero commemorated in his youthful prime – showed a further stage of similarity to actual human appearance.Within little more than a century, the artistic end was achieved: a sculpture of a man that looked like a man.

  His eyes, made of glass paste for realistic effect, have dropped out. His head and body were found separately, and some parts of the body have never been found. Also, his surface paintwork that once gave him a healthy outdoor tan has disappeared, so he is not as natural as he once was. All the same, here is the ultimate kouros: a marble statue dedicated on the Acropolis, a great sanctuary overlooking the city of Athens.The young man is anonymous; the statue known only as ‘Kritian Boy’ (Fig. 30).

  Kritian Boy gives us the effect of what has been hailed as the ‘Greek Revolution’. The youth projects himself with a demure yet confident air: he wants to be admired, as well he might, because not only is the viewer inclined to think, ‘What a wonderful body’, but also because the artistry here gives us such direct visual access. It all seems so natural: flesh stretched taut over muscle and bone; one leg relaxed, the other assuming the balance of weight; vertebrae forming a gentle curve; kneecaps and ribcage causing contours we can recognize.There is nothing schematic or conceptual about Kritian Boy. This is how we are: the human body at last ‘discovered’ in a work of art.

  POLYKLEITOS AND THE PERFECT PHYSIQUE

  The Greek word gymnos means ‘unclothed’, and no Greek city was complete if it lacked a g
ymnasium, literally ‘a place to be without clothes’.The institutional centrality of exercising unclothed was one of the defining aspects of Greek culture.The Greeks were highly conscious, too, that their custom of competing unclothed at athletic festivals was peculiar to them – a custom that ‘barbarians’ or non-Greeks might regard as shocking.This nudity habit was, however, all the more visible for being culturally distinctive. At the Olympic Games – which, before the Macedonian and Roman conquest of Greece, were strictly confined to competitors of Greek (‘Hellenic’) ethnic origin – athletes who had triumphed without their clothes on were ostentatiously commemorated in that way, so victory statues proliferated. Some showed the athlete crowning himself with the garland of triumph; others, such as the well-known image of an all-rounder especially remembered for his discus-throwing, attempted to catch the dynamic effort that brought glory.

  There was no shortage of victory occasions, so an artist could make a very good living from the production of commemorative pieces. One fifth-century BC Greek sculptor who supplied the demand for athletic statues at Olympia and elsewhere was Polykleitos, who took his work seriously – so seriously, it seems, that he came to regard the artist’s role in defining a prize-winning body as equally important, if not more so, to that of the trainer in the gymnasium or wrestling-school.

  Polykleitos aspired to make art a branch of geometry. He wrote a treatise about how to represent the ideal physique in bronze or stone, using a system of mathematical calculations. All we know about the details of this lost text by Polykleitos amounts to a few frustratingly enigmatic phrases cited in ancient literature, such as ‘Beauty comes about from many numbers’. No statue has yet been found that can be confidently called an original work by this artist. However, a fair notion of the Polykleitan project can be gained from the many copies or adaptations taken from his original bronze-cast pieces. Men, boys, women – it seems the measuring-system devised by Polykleitos was flexible insofar as it could accommodate variations of both age and gender in human form. However, there was little range in the shape or schema of an aesthetically successful body as prescribed in the so-called Kanon of Polykleitos.The Greek word kanon gives us our ‘canonical’, which implies a standard to be respected, a central point of authority. If copies from the output of Polykleitos illustrate his rules (one work, the Doryphoros or ‘Spear Carrier’, is usually reckoned as constructed according to the sculptor’s Kanon), then it is clear enough that ‘aesthetically successful’ in Polykleitan terms means a body dominated by qualities of tautness, symmetry and balance. A harmony of parts was what Polykleitos appears to have sought and articulated in solid form (Fig. 31). It was as if he created a series of theoretical rods passing through key points of the body. For example, if one knee was low and relaxed, then a rise and tautness must be caused across the axis of the opposing hips and legs.The effect of this system was to establish what must technically be known as a ‘chiastic balance’ – from the Greek chiasmos, implying diagonal tension – or, in Italian, as contrapposto: a matching of physical forces in human gait and posture.