applied to small subjects. We instinctively feel
that even the ablest artist must sometimes have played fast and loose with
the laws of perspective, if tasked to cover the enormous surfaces of
Egyptian pylons.

[Illustration: Fig. 175.--Scene from tomb of Rekhmara, Eighteenth Dynasty.]

[Illustration: Fig. 176.--Scene from Mastaba of Ptahhotep, Fifth Dynasty.]

[Illustration: Fig. 177.--Palestrina mosaic.]

Hence the unities of the subject are never strictly observed in these
enormous bas-reliefs. The main object being to perpetuate the memory of a
victorious Pharaoh, that Pharaoh necessarily plays the leading part; but
instead of selecting from among his striking deeds some one leading episode
pre-eminently calculated to illustrate his greatness, the Egyptian artist
delighted to present the successive incidents of his campaigns at a single
_coup d'oeil_. Thus treated, the pylons of Luxor and the Ramesseum show a
Syrian night attack upon the Egyptian camp; a seizure of spies sent by the
prince of the Kheta for the express purpose of being caught and giving
false intelligence of his movements; the king's household troops surprised
and broken by the Khetan chariots; the battle of Kadesh and its various
incidents, so furnishing us, as it were, with a series of illustrated
despatches of the Syrian campaign undertaken by Rameses II. in the fifth
year of his reign. After this fashion precisely did the painters of the
earliest Italian schools depict within the one field, and in one
uninterrupted sequence, the several episodes of a single narrative. The
scenes are irregularly dispersed over the surface of the wall, without any
marked lines of separation, and, as with the bas-reliefs upon the column of
Trajan, one is often in danger of dividing the groups in the wrong place,
and of confusing the characters. This method is reserved almost exclusively
for official art. In the interior decoration of temples and tombs, the
various parts of the one subject are distributed in rows ranged one above
the other, from the ground line to the cornice. Thus another difficulty is
added to the number of those which prevent us from understanding the style
and intention of Egyptian design. We often imagine that we are looking at a
series of isolated scenes, when in fact we have before our eyes the
_disjecta membra_ of a single composition. Take, for example, one wall-side
of the tomb of Ptahhotep at Sakkarah (fig. 176). If we would discover the