The Egyptian Character of Certain Egyptian Painting Techniques

In ancient Egypt, colour was essential to both statuary and two-dimensional art, for it simulated life, and thus gave images the capacity to sustain life when ritually animated - the magical, eternal life that was the raison d'être of almost every Egyptian image, whether it represented a god or a tomb owner receiving offerings, a bearer carrying offerings, or a trussed bull about to become an offering.

These 'living images' were meant to last forever. Paint, however, is a fragile, often evanescent medium. Egyptians sought to reinforce their painted images with carved underlays. Thus, from the beginning of the dynastic period on, the two-dimensional medium of choice was not paint, but a form of fortified painting - that is to say, painted relief. The use of paint alone, in temples and tombs, was always a second best, necessary when the wall surface was unfit for carving, or when a project had to be completed quickly.⁽¹⁾

Just as the medium of paint had a particular function in ancient Egypt, so also many of the basic conventions of Egyptian two-dimensional art had applications or meanings specific to Egyptian culture. Two of these highly culture-specific conventions which have often been related to features of Minoan painting are the dominance of the outline and the flatness of pictorial space.

The contour of almost every figure or object in an Egyptian painting or relief is clearly outlined, as are its main interior details. This outline, applied as a preliminary step of the painting (or the relief-carving and painting), was re-applied as a last step in the finishing process. So noticeable are these lines that many Egyptian paintings give the impression of coloured drawings.

Earlier in this century, some scholars seem to have assumed that this 'colouring-book' technique of first drawing the subject and then colouring it in represents an early or naive stage of painting. This is demonstrably not true. Nor was the technique intrinsically Egyptian: throughout the predynastic period, figures and objects were painted by applying the colour directly; only those images whose colour was that of the ground were rendered in outline.⁽²⁾ However, the earliest known mural painting, found in a late predynastic tomb at Hierakonpolis,⁽³⁾ shows increased interest in outlining, using it not only for reserved figures, but also for coloured objects, such as the boat cabins. This painting prefigures dynastic art in other significant conventions, such as the smiting scene and the use of three figures to indicate a plural.⁽⁴⁾

The Egyptian writing system and the conventions for pictorial representation developed concurrently,and each exerted a profound influence on the other (Fischer 1986, chs. 1-3; Wilkinson 1992). By the

beginning of the Old Kingdom, these interrelated systems were not only fully established, but were well on their way to becoming standardised. In the early Fourth Dynasty, when the 'Meidum geese' were painted as a minor detail in an ambitiously decorated tomb, the outline not only defined the birds, but gave the entire composition a linear, almost calligraphic quality (Saleh and Sourouzian 1987, 26).

To a great extent, the emphasis on the outline was dictated by the nature of hieroglyphs, which, being pictures, required rigorous standardisation in order to be legible or, indeed, even recognisable. Only the shape of its tail tip distinguishes the swallow, used in writing words with a positive connotation, such as 'great' and 'large', from the sparrow, a major component of words like 'small' and 'bad', always with a negative sense (Gardiner 1957, 471 nos. G 36 and G 37 respectively). Since the identification of a hieroglyph could depend on one small detail of its shape,⁽⁵⁾ the sign and, consequently, the image were defined by their outlines.

For Egyptian painters, the primacy of the line was deeply ingrained. Most of them were trained as scribes, and were required to draw and paint inscriptions as well as figural scenes. Some of their titles also suggest that they were considered primarily draughtsmen. For many, the most important of their professional activities may have been drawing the preliminary outlines for reliefs (for further on these subjects, see Russmann forthcoming). Such drawings are frequently very detailed, and many show the beautiful, fluent lines of a master.

Important as the outline was for Egyptian painting, however, certain elements were often brushed in freehand. These uncontoured, 'undefined' elements form a miscellaneous subgroup, apparently subject to a secondary convention. But 'convention' may be too strong a term for habits which may well have owed more to a sense of what was fitting than to any explicit formulation (and are of interest for that very reason). 'Freehand' painting includes the more or less trompe l'oeil imitations of other materials, especially stone. Another category comprises natural variations in animals, particularly in the hides of cattle, which are sometimes depicted with such verve as to suggest a real appreciation of random variation - or perhaps of the encouragement to artistic licence. The most interesting and problematic category of 'undefined' images consists of plants. Since the earliest examples comprise tender browsing plants and fragile desert flora,⁽⁶⁾ it has been suggested that their lack of outline is meant to convey their ephemeral nature. But by the New Kingdom, plants without outlines might also include robust papyrus stalks, and even trees (Russmann forthcoming).

The flatness of pictorial space in Egyptian painting and relief has often been discussed. Consciously or not, such discussions have almost always been based on the premises of traditional western art, with its pervasive spatial illusionism and its related concepts, such as perspective and viewpoint. None of this has much relevance to the conceptions or conventions underlying Egyptian two-dimensional art. That these discussions have often concluded by criticising Egyptian representations of space is thus neither very surprising nor very useful.

In fact, Egyptian two-dimensional art ignores the existence of any space or depth: not just the illusionary depth of pictorial space, but also the slight physical depth of the reliefs themselves. Even in the boldest Egyptian relief,⁽⁷⁾ the figure is entirely confined to a two-dimensional plane. That plane, more-over, is purely conceptual; it cannot be identified with either the surrounding surface or the surface of the figure itself.

Thus Egyptian relief differs fundamentally from Greek, and most subsequent western, two-dimensional art, in which the figure appears to be a three-dimensional form partially embedded in the matrix of the surface. More significantly, the Egyptian tradition differs in a similar way from Akkadian reliefs, and from the reliefs of several later cultures of the ancient Near East. All of these depicted relief figures as if they existed at least partly in the round (for further discussion, see Russmann 1980, 62-63). Although the Egyptian conception of two dimensionality is virtually identical with the absolute flatness of its writing, the connection between the two was even more profound. Figural art and hieroglyphic writing developed together as parts of a single system, in which they were not only interdependent, but not infrequently interchangeable (Fischer 1986, 24-46). The fortunate survival of several key monuments from the beginning of the dynastic period enables us to see the simultaneous development in both art and writing of a register system in which the surface was neutral surface and the base line a construct rather than a representation of the ground (e.g. Saleh and Sourouzian 1987, 7-9). The purpose was readability, for figures as well as hieroglyphs.

Sunk relief seems first to have been used for inscriptions, but its use was almost immediately extended to figural subjects, for which it provided the same advantages of accentuating contours and further neutralising the ground which in this form of relief is physically neither behind nor in front of the images.

The conventions for depicting groups of figures are also comparable to those of writing. Figures may be separated along the base line,⁽⁸⁾ overlapped,⁽⁹⁾ or, as was often done with hieroglyphic signs, superimposed. In every case, the depth of the figures' actual placement in space is denied.

When it was necessary to represent landscape or architectural elements, the Egyptians used the two-dimensional devices of the plan (or map) and the elevation. These were routinely combined, as an architect or an engineer might combine them;⁽¹⁰⁾ such combinations are so natural that it seems unnecessary and even misleading to characterise them as naive attempts at perspective, or unassimilated points of view.

An ambitious early example of the plan and elevation in combination is the representation of the opening of a canal, carved in relief on a ceremonial mace head dating to the late proto dynastic period. The branching course of the canal, in which the water is indicated, is shown in maplike form, onto which are superimposed the figures of King Scorpion and his attendants.⁽¹¹⁾

For a very long time thereafter, plan/elevation combinations, so far as they survived, seem to have been limited to rather simple depictions of gardens or isolated buildings. Throughout the Middle Kingdom and into the early New Kingdom, the maplike mode of representing large areas seems to have been confined to depictions of the Underworld inside Middle Kingdom coffins, on the walls of New Kingdom royal tombs,⁽¹²⁾ and, on papyrus, in New Kingdom Books of the Dead (e.g. Faulkner 1985, 10, 105, 110-111).⁽¹³⁾ From the latter venue, such scenes migrated onto the painted walls of New Kingdom private tombs, such as the tomb of Sennedjem (TT 1) at Deir el Medina (Lhote 1954, pl. 69).

These underworld maps also served as sources for the first Egyptian experiments with landscape space, in the wall paintings of several Theban private tombs of the mid-Eighteenth Dynasty, such as the tomb of Nakht (TT 52) (Lhote 1954, pls. 72, 73). I have discussed elsewhere the relationship of the meandering brown line of the land in this painting to the watercourses in earlier models, and the innovative details that suggest an attempt to depict a real landscape, as well as the fact that the success of this and similar experiments in the truly two-dimensional medium of paint turned to failure, which may have been acknowledged as such, when they were translated into relief (Russmann forthcoming).

The Theban tomb painters of the mid-Eighteenth Dynasty were an extraordinarily innovative group. They had considerable influence on two-dimensional art at Amarna, where a number of their novelties, such as the representation of the toes on the near foot and the frontal depiction of a young woman's breasts, were transferred to the superior medium of relief (see Russmann 1980). The results of this change of medium are less clumsy than the attempt at relief landscape described above, but they are awkward enough to demonstrate the hieroglyphic flatness of Egyptian relief, which lacked the capacity for even small degrees of real or imagined depth.

One of the Amarna relief carvers, however, may well have been inspired by the innovations in painting, to attempt the remarkable experiment of adapting sunk relief to the space, or at least the texture, of three dimensional reality, by carving a grape vine, with a deeply rounded bunch of grapes, a heavy trunk of medium depth, and a lightly incised tracery of leaves (Metropolitan Museum of Art 1985.328.23).⁽¹⁴⁾ The attempt was admirable, but the result is less impressive. The failures of attempts like these may explain the fact that Amarna architectural representations, though much larger and more elaborate than their predecessors, adhered to the old conventions of combining plans and elevations.

(1). By contrast, dwellings, including palaces, were built of mudbrick rather than the stone of temples and tombs, and paint was used to decorate their interiors with scenes, figures, and decorative motifs.

(2). Almost all of these are paintings on pots, but a fragmentary painted linen 'shroud' in Turin shows the same techniques on a larger surface (Donadoni et al. 1988, 128-129, 158-159).

(3). For references, see Adams 1996, 1.

(4). For the smiting scene, see Hall 1986, 4; this may be the earliest example. The use of three for the plural (and hence for an infinite number) is also discussed by Bietak (this volume). Equally noteworthy in the Hierakonpolis tomb painting is a debased version of the 'Master of Animals' motif, which originated in the Near East.

(5). Interior details, on the other hand, could vary widely, and were often omitted altogether.

(6). The latter attested in the early Fourth Dynasty tomb of Nefermaat and Atet at Meidum (Saleh and Sourouzian 1987, 26), as well as the Middle Kingdom tomb of Antefoker/Senet at Thebes (Davies 1920, frontispiece, pl. 5A above).

(7). Significantly, however, Egyptian reliefs are seldom very bold; cf. Russmann 1995, 126.

(8). This is the standard method for showing couples standing together, or seated on a single chair. Note that, in such cases, the standard two dimensional convention, by which the wife is shown behind the husband, takes precedence over any consideration of their actual spatial relationship.

(9). This device may precede the beginnings of writing, for at least one predynastic example is attested: Quibell 1900, pl. 19:6. Note also the notional effect of alternating the skin colours of overlapping human figures, e.g. Lhote 1954, 43, pls. 24, 105.

(10). These conventions are also discussed, in slightly different form, by Bietak (this volume). For a combination of plan and elevation on a working drawing, see Davies 1917.

(11). Oxford, Ashmolean Museum E 3632, excavated at Hierakonpolis: Quibell 1900, pl. 26c; Cialowicz 1987, 32-38.

(12). Such as the tomb of Tuthmosis III in the Valley of the Kings: Fornari and Tosi 1987.

(13). Note also real maps and plants, such as that of the Wadi Hammamat in the Museo Egizio, Turin (Donadoni et al. 1988, 22-23).

(14). Roehrig 1992, 31. Grape vines were amongst the most idiosyncratically represented of all plants, and several Eighteenth Dynasty Theban painters depicted them with bravura, e.g. Lhote 1954, 43, Pl. 117.

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