68 THE FINE ARTS. 
first traces of painting properly so called, ¢.¢. the endeavor to represent 
corporeal objects with the colors belonging to them on a plane surface, 
among the Egyptians,down to the utter decline of this art at the time of the 
introduction of the Christian religion. 
A. The Egyptians. 
We have found among the Egyptians the evidences of a considerable 
degree of culture, as compared with other ancient nations, in their architec- 
ture and sculpture as well as in other arts of scientific and social life; and 
the same is the case with respect to painting, although this stood at a con- 
siderably lower degree of advancement than the plastic art. 
The painting of the Egyptians commences with the coloring of statues 
and reliefs, and does not change its character through being transferred to 
a level surface, whether it be walls, or tombs, or hypogeea, or the outside or 
inside of mummy-chests, or the byssus wrappers of mummies, or rolls of 
papyrus. The colors, mixed with glue or wax, are applied to the stone, or 
in the case of mummy-chests to a thin layer of gypsum, without regard to 
light and shadow; and without mixing or shading. Thesame simple color- 
ing materials are employed everywhere in the same manner, with some 
though a very slight regard to the natural local colors, although sometimes 
a symbolical signification appears to be aimed at. To men is usually given 
a peculiar flesh color; women have somewhat more of a yellowish tinge; 
quadrupeds are usually red, birds for the most part green and blue, and so 
too is water. But everywhere the same type occurs in the drawings to 
which we have alluded in speaking of the reliefs. The Egyptians remained 
in drawing pretty much as if they were dealing with round sculptures, a 
new proof that sculpture is older than painting; and even in the ripest age 
of their art they stand at the point where other nations usually begin: they 
never got beyond the straight, angular, scarcely waved strokes of the first 
cutlines of their figures, and to these figures they gave very little action, so 
that one is almost exactly like the other. The position and play of the 
muscles, together with the manifold variations which they produce in the 
body according to its different inflexions, the Egyptians, if acquainted with 
them, were unable to imitate in drawing and painting, on account of their 
ignorance of chiaroscuro. Still it excites our astonishment to behold in 
these paintings, how defective soever they may be, in the royal tombs, on 
the ceilings of Denderah and Syene, and on the overturned Sphinx at 
Heliopolis, the same glowing colors and the same perfect freshness that 
they exhibited at the time of their execution thousands of years ago. Count 
Caylus ascribed this circumstance to a mordant added to the color; yet 
colors usually suffer by the addition of sharp mordants, and hence we are 
tempted to attribute it rather to an admixture of wax, by means of which 
the colors were made to penetrate deeper into the stone. It may also be 
possible, according to the opinion of some antiquarians, that the reliefs of 
the Egyptians were moulded, after the fashion of owr clay models, out of a 
plastic, colored mass, which gradually acquired the hardness of stone; and 
such compositions we have at the present day,which become hard enough 
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