Plus they had the money of God.
Artist types prefer to flatter their subjects and their patrons prefer that too. Egyptian artists worked out proportions early on. These proportions are transferred by grid with chalk line, basically, onto walls, ceilings, floors, column, for paintings and bas reliefs, and for statues. The grids changed over time and ideal changed too, but they stuck with idea of features falling on points of a grid. The number of lines in the grid for full figures changed over dynasties but not by much. Coincidentally the artistic grid reverted to Old Kingdom style for this person's son's tomb, pharaoh Tutankhamun. A switch to an early grid is obvious. The figures look old-timey even for then and it signaled a rejection of the Armenian stye developed under his father's disruptive reign.
This is showing what they did, not how they did it. The grid comes first before the face is formed. Here we have the face first, and the grid is shown. The artist would draw a grid, shape the face inside the grid, put the mouth where it goes in the right size, the nose, eyes, forehead. The same holds for the torso, arms, legs, hands and feet. This same manner of discovering point and line placements allows small works on papyrus to be transferred to walls and even to the scale of monuments.
7 comments:
The messed up ears and glass eye make the rest of the features standout nicely.
Looks like Mike Tyson bit off her left ear lobe.
It is beautiful.
Upon closer inspection, there's a hint of a man jaw and those grimace lines around the mouth don't do much for me. So, she's down to high cheek bones, which I'm ambivalent about. And that brow looks a bit formidable--I'll pass on her. Imperfect beauty is a gift from god, but this over-hyped chick coasts by on being thin and rich---and not having boils or lesions.
Didn't the Pharoahs have to marry their sisters? I'm sure they got tool around, but for marriage purposes only the sister was good enough. Maybe those distorted features weren't due to misapplication of the grid, but rather to genetic defects........A lot of royal families were surprisingly ugly. I'm thinking of that Goya picture of the Spanish royals. They were really ugly. Too much inbreeding.. Nowadays, such an ugly royal family would be deposed.
Yes. They married their sisters. It seems every female royal is called sister. They become their sister by blood and by marriage. All female members were termed sister. Their harems were large and they had the real beauties of their own country and royals of other countries for wives and as hostages. The term sister does not necessarily mean their own mother and father's daughter as we organize bloodlines today. Yes, there were a lot of ugly ones too.
There are statues of ugly pharaohs.
This face fits a grid with mathematic perfection and no face can be expected to do that. No face can be expected to have it's mouth fall precisely within a contrived artistic grid and all other elements as perfectly as this face does. This face it too perfect from an artist's pov. The mouth in relationship with the chin, and each element of both eyes their placement and their size, the bottom of the eye, the top of the eye socket, the eyebrow all falling perfectly within an artist grid, both horizontal lines and vertical lines, the eyeballs are perfectly in their grid, all that simply cannot happen in real life. Some kind of individuality some unique element will defy the purely contrived grid. While the grid does help an artist place the elements and size them and bock them out on the stone from all sides so that eyes are never too far apart, the forehead never too large, the chin placed, with perfection, the nose the right size the ears the right size, and so forth. The grid helps immensely as template while individual traits deviate to unique beauty, but here there is no deviation at all. None.
Conclusion, she did not look exactly like this. Good looker, yes, this gives us an idea, but not this idealistic (to them).
block, not bock.
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