[Proportion and Style in Ancient Egyptian Art] [Author: Robins, Gay] [January, 1994]

by Gay Robins

The painted and relief-cut walls of ancient Egyptian tombs and temples record an amazing continuity of customs and beliefs over nearly 3,000 years. Even the artistic style of the scenes seems unchanging from century to century, but this appearance is deceptive. In this pioneering work, Gay Robins offers convincing evidence, based on a study of Egyptian usage of grid systems and proportions, that innovation and stylistic variation played a significant role in ancient Egyptian art. Robins provides a comprehensive account of the squared grid systems used by ancient Egyptian artists to achieve acceptable proportions for standing, sitting, and kneeling human figures. She traces the grid system from its Old Kingdom origins as a system of guide lines through its development in the Middle Kingdom and continued employment into the Late and Ptolemaic periods. She is the first author to explore its use with female figures to reflect the actual physical differences between women and men. From this investigation, Robins offers the first chronological account of variations in the proportions of male and female figures - an important component of style - from the Early Dynastic Period to the Ptolemaic Period. Her study includes a detailed account of the Amarna canon of proportions, which she discovered, that accompanied the revolutionary stylistic changes instituted by the heretic king Akhenaton. She also considers for the first time how, in general, the use of a grid system influenced composition as a whole. Numerous line drawings of paintings and reliefs with superimposed grids, either derived from actual grid traces surviving on monuments, or calculated according to the systems used by the Egyptians themselves, illustrate the text. Proportion and Style in Ancient Egyptian Art uniquely reveals some of the principles and practices of Egyptian art that are essential to its proper understanding by both interested lay persons and professional Egyptologists and art historians. I

Genres: Egypt, Egyptology, Art

Paperback

First published November 30, 1993

About the author

An art historian, her work focuses on ancient Egyptian art, composition, gender and sexuality.

Professor Gay Robins studied Egyptology as an undergraduate at the University of Durham, and then obtained a D.Phil. from Oxford University in 1981 under the supervision of Professor John Baines. In 1988 obtained her promotion to Professor. She retired in 2018 as Professor Emerita of Art History.
Over the course of her career, she has published numerous articles and books on the topics of Ancient Egyptian art, the decoration of eighteenth dynasty non-royal Theban tombs, and women and gender issues in Ancient Egypt.

Reviews

[Ed Smiley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book will have different appeal depending.

I think this is of a lot of interest to anybody, who is

* interested in alternate artistic canons of the human body
* an Egyptologist
* Egyptian art

Dry, scholarly, be warned, but fascinating. I am not a researcher in the field so I tended to skim the book.

If anything, this increased my respect for ancient Egyptian art.

They had a complete system for encoding three dimensional objects in two dimensions without perspective in order to enhance the two dimensional decorative patterns. They portrayed the most typical view of each part, combining them in a seamless way, which reminds one of Cubism.

If a god (or king etc.) normally held a scepter in the right hand, they would portray the god that way if the god was facing right. They identified right with forward.

Sometimes, they would put a figure facing "backwards", to the left, to add rhythm.

If the same god were facing left, the god would be effectively mirror imaged, yet the scepter would still be in the right hand but it would be attached to the left arm.

So the spatial logic of the scene, and the way that right/forward left/back was encoded in Egyptian art would trump the side of the hand that had the thumb in real life. And I am sure that most artists were aware of this, and it bothered them no more than blueprint of a building bothers us.

In temples the work was usually completed. But in tombs the heirs usually stopped work when uncle Anentahiptohop dropped dead, since they needed to use the tomb, and they wanted to have something left of the estate.

Anyway, because the work is incomplete, they can see the way that the work is laid out in tombs.

There is a grid system for organizing and relating the major figures. It's sort of like the heads system in western life drawing--they just don't try to cover every possible situation at any possible angle like we do, anyway that would defeat the purpose of harmonizing everything in the plane.

This mostly applies to the major figures. Minor figures were almost invariably drawn freehand. Also, they relaxed almost all of the canon in depicting battles, since these were supposed to portray conflict.

[David Waldron · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the initial stage of scene composition, ancient Egyptian draftsmen often applied vertical and horizontal lines forming a grid on the surface to be decorated. The grid was used to ensure that the scene’s major figures were proportioned correctly. This books explores this technique and the way in which it evolved over pharaonic history. The author's prose is clear and concise and she writes authoritatively. The topic is quite specialized and may not be of interest to the general reader. However, the author provides an introduction to the principles and conventions of Egyptian art that I found extraordinarily lucid and useful.