Word: drioton
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Akhnaton's reform died with him because the next pharaoh, Tutankhamen ("King Tut"), preferred flattery. The statues done of him have what Drioton calls "a delicate prettiness with sometimes a touch of romantic melancholy." Since the gods were customarily carved to resemble the reigning monarch, sculptors had to make them beautiful and blue, too. It got so that animals were the only subjects artists could treat freely...
...bottom of the garden, nearly 3,000 years before the birth of Christ, Egyptians of the "Old Kingdom" produced temples and sculptures that their successors could never surpass. As an example of the earliest and best in Egyptian art, Drioton picks a statue of King Khephren, the man who built the Great Sphinx. Except for the falcon of the royal ancestor-god Horus, which perches like a thought behind King Khephren's head, the portrait shows none of the symbolic attributes of royalty. "And yet," Drioton says, "such is the majesty emanating from this statue of an almost naked...
Egyptian art conventions did change over the centuries, though most of the modifications were so slight as to be almost imperceptible to the artists who made them. Slowly, Drioton says, "the sublime grandeur of the royal faces . . . gave way to a more human ideal of majesty mixed with a certain good-natured simplicity...
Near Smile. About 1000 B.C., court artists tried to set the clock back to old King Khephren's time. The new sculptures went back only part way. "They never indeed recaptured the old robust vigor and naturalness," Drioton says. They had "a softness, almost a smile, which links them with the archaic Greek sculpture whose contemporaries they were." A seated scribe looking for all the world like a modern businessman on a holiday at the beach was one of the period's best products...
...opening Egypt to the Greeks. Yet the tradition, which had lived so long, was also a long time dying. Under the Ptolemies, and even during the early years of Roman domination, the work of Egyptian sculptors "was still pharaonic art, made more interesting by a restrained exoticism." But, says Drioton sadly, the day came "when sculptors . . . tried to treat the drapery of the toga like the costume of the pharaohs . . . When Egyptian sculpture reached this point, it could only disappear...