![]() Ramses seems to have been particularly close to Nefertari, whom the painters have rendered with careful detail, often using naturalistic techniques such as shading. Built some 3,250 years ago, it has been dubbed the “Egyptian Sistine Chapel.” The tomb is remarkable for its magnificent illustrative decoration and contains thousands of square feet of paintings that depict the magical rituals necessary to reach the afterlife. The tomb of Nefertari, the Great Royal Wife of Ramses II, stands in the Valley of the Queens. ( Here's how a stubborn archaeologist found the lost tomb of Tutankhamun.) Although Tutankhamun reigned for only a few years after his father Akhenaten’s death, the rapidity with which the old gods, and the old style, had been restored is evident in the art of his famous tomb. Akhenaten moved the capital to Amarna, and the art produced during his reign was dubbed “Amarna style.” People were represented with elongated heads, luscious lips, protruding bellies, and thin legs.Īfter Akhenaten’s death, his new theology and art were abandoned artists quickly returned to the traditional style and the old gods. Massive royal monuments, palaces, and temples provided artists with enormous new “canvases” to feature their work.ĭuring this period of growth, Egypt experienced a religious and artistic revolution led by Pharaoh Akhenaten, who replaced the old pantheon with worship of one god: Aten, the sun disk. The traditional painting style flourished and slightly evolved to feature cleaner, simpler designs.Įgypt’s New Kingdom, starting around 1539 B.C., was a time of expansion and imperialism. Many fine specimens of their works were found in the royal tombs of Saqqara, near the ancient capital of Memphis.Īs the age of the pyramids drew to a close, Egypt underwent a period of transition that lasted until around 1975 B.C., the beginning of what became known as the Middle Kingdom. At this time, artists also began using a technique called sunken relief, in which outlines would be etched into plaster and then painted, a technique that provided the flatness of the artwork with a degree of light and shade. Mapping their work onto it ensured correct figure positioning and proportions. ( See rare, lifelike portraits of Egyptians who lived thousands of years ago.)ĭuring the Old Kingdom, artists began using a grid system to create their works. Day is separated from night, female from male, and earth from heaven, a symmetry that is replicated in most Egyptian painting. Central to m’aat was the organizing principle of duality. The body and head are almost always shown in profile while the eyes and shoulders face forward.Īlthough the themes in Tomb 100-a king subjugating people, animals, a procession of boats-would dominate painting for centuries, the emerging style adopted a much more tightly organized composition, which reflected m’aat, a complex spiritual concept that embraced order, harmony, balance, truth, justice, and morality. Colors are uniform, and forms are organized in bands similar in appearance to a modern comic strip.Īnimals and plants are often depicted with vivid naturalism, while people are usually rendered in a flat, two-dimensional style. The same themes-life along the Nile, scenes from the afterlife, the pharaoh dispensing justice-recur for centuries, in the same distinctively flat and two-dimensional style. The most highly regarded task for these craftsmen, however, was decorating temples and tombs. ![]() The application of their skills included the decoration of statues or coffins, as well as more mundane pieces such as furniture and stelae. They would sketch out the draft in red, and the master would correct in black. Apprentices learned by making copies of earlier works on walls or on ostraca (pieces of stone or sherds). Historians know from hieroglyphics that these anonymous artists were called sesh qedut, roughly translated as “scribes of outlines.” The office was hereditary, handed down from father to son. ( These are the sacred and secret rituals in the Book of the Dead.) The Egyptian painter was striving to capture a subject not in one moment of happiness or sadness, but for all time, a nameless undertaking, carried out in praise of the cosmic order. This idea of art having a function beyond aesthetic pleasure is alien to classical and modern notions of painting.
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