Thanks very much to lovely Jane for posting an essay about the conventions of 2 dimensional Egyptian art. She gave it to one of her guests to review before she submitted it for her Egyptology course. The guest said that she found it really helpful to read before she visited the tombs so Jane thought that she would give a section of it a wider audience. Here's a very short extract, but see the above page for the entire essay.
It is important when looking at Egyptian wall paintings to remember what we are looking at. This is not some pretty picture to cheer up a tomb but it had a vital and significant purpose . To provide for the deceased in the after life. The artist could not experiment or he might destroy the whole purpose of what he was trying to achieve. Art as, defined by European standards , did not exist, the decoration of the tomb had a specific function and, as such, artistic considerations were not important. According to Aldred (1980 p15) the artist “… represented not what could be seen transiently, but what he expected to exist for perpetuity, symbols rather than images”.
This does not mean the tombs are devoid of beauty but rather should be viewed with an unprejudiced eye. The tomb craftsman used two dimensional art to fully represent what he was trying to show. It was ‘fit for purpose’; indeed it was more than that as some of the small vignettes are testimony to skill to the largely unknown craftsman. Indeed “to represent was, in a way, to create” (Robins 1997 p12) so they needed to represent the clearest picture of the object or figure, so it was instantly recognisable.
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