Egyptian Civilization —— Reading Jiang Xun's History of Western Art (2)

In the era without words, human memory is very difficult to accumulate and progress is slow; Once you have written records, the whole world of thinking will change dramatically. This is also an important basis for dividing the general history of civilization into two stages: "prehistoric" and "history". It was not until the invention of writing that mankind broke away from the long and chaotic prehistoric times and entered the dawn of history.

The expressive force of painting and sculpture promoted the development of early characters.

This stone tablet can be said to illustrate one thing in the form of plane relief. Therefore, the shape is very simplified, and the embryonic form of hieroglyphics has been formed, which can also be associated with the hieroglyphics on Egyptian stone tablets later.

style

What is "style"?

In the field of art, the long-term search for accurate and consistent expressions has formed a "style".

Egyptians used lines in a very precise way, with mathematical rigor and a tendency to be highly geometric. All these can be seen in Egyptian art in the future.

Egyptian artistic style tends to establish a high order. No matter how complicated the content is, how chaotic the scene is and how tortuous the plot is, the Egyptians always seem to want to sum them up into a geometric symbol and arrange them in a regular space in an orderly way.

Portrait carving in Egypt has a very high achievement, which also directly influenced the later Greek art.

Portraits in Egypt often choose hard stones. When carving, they pay attention to the integrity of the whole fast surface. People either stand upright or sit up. Most of them are straight ahead, with feet together and absolute symmetry on both sides, creating an eternal aesthetic feeling.

Egyptian art is closely related to their cognition of death.

Egyptians believe that there is another world after death, where people can continue to live. Therefore, everything before their death must be copied through painting and sculpture and brought to another world.

Most of the Egyptian art we see now comes from the excavation of tombs, which reproduces the life beliefs of thousands of Egyptians for four or five thousand years.

As early as the early dynasty (about 3 100 BC-2686 BC), Egypt created a simple and dynamic portrait of songkhla women. The portrait, with hands held high, seems to be dancing, omitting many elements, but still conveys the graceful figure of the female body. This is the earliest beginning of western art's pursuit of human aesthetics, and it is also the contribution of Egyptian art to later generations.