ngle figure. The head
is almost always given in profile, but is provided with a full-face eye and
placed upon a full-face bust. The full-face bust adorns a trunk seen from a
three-quarters point of view, and this trunk is supported upon legs
depicted in profile. Very seldom do we meet with figures treated according
to our own rules of perspective. Most of the minor personages represented
in the tomb of Khnumhotep seem, however, to have made an effort to
emancipate themselves from the law of malformation. Their bodies are given
in profile, as well as their heads and legs; but they thrust forward first
one shoulder and then the other, in order to show both arms (fig. 164), and
the effect is not happy. Yet, if we examine the treatment of the farm
servant who is cramming a goose, and, above all, the figure of the standing
man who throws his weight upon the neck of a gazelle to make it kneel down
(fig. 165), we shall see that the action of the arms and hips is correctly
rendered, that the form of the back is quite right, and that the prominence
of the chest--thrown forward in proportion as the shoulders and arms are
thrown back--is drawn without any exaggeration. The wrestlers of the Beni
Hasan tombs, the dancers and servants of the Theban catacombs, attack,
struggle, posture, and go about their work with perfect naturalness and
ease (fig. 166). These, however, are exceptions. Tradition, as a rule, was
stronger than nature, and to the end of the chapter, the Egyptian masters
continued to deform the human figure. Their men and women are actual
monsters from the point of view of the anatomist; and yet, after all, they
are neither so ugly nor so ridiculous as might be supposed by those who
have seen only the wretched copies so often made by our modern artists. The
wrong parts are joined to the right parts with so much skill that they seem
to have grown there. The natural lines and the fictitious lines follow and
complement each other so ingeniously, that the former appear to give rise
of necessity to the latter. The conventionalities of Egyptian art once
accepted, we cannot sufficiently admire the technical skill displayed by
the draughtsman. His line was pure, firm, boldly begun, and as boldly
prolonged. Ten or twelve strokes of the brush sufficed to outline a figure
the size of life. The whole head, from the nape of the neck to the rise of
the throat above the collar-bone, was executed at one sweep. Two long
undulating lines gav