these spontaneous naturalistic drawings no longer appear.
Neolithic man shows a marked advance on the capacity of his
Palaeolithic predecessors in all the useful arts of life: his tools,
his pottery, his weapons; but as an artist he was beyond comparison
inferior. His attempts to draw men and beasts resulted
in no more than conventional symbols, such as an intelligent
child might scribble; of the Palaeolithic man’s taste for design,
as shown in the carved work of the caves, or of his power of
reproducing nature, there is not a sign. Keenness of observation
and deftness of hand are no longer developed because no longer
needed for the purposes of existence, and representative art
almost dies out, to be, however, revived at a further stage of
civilization. At this further stage the sociological motive of art
is commemoration. It is in connexion with the tomb, the temple
and the palace that in early but still fully organized communities
art finds its field of operations. Such communities we find in
ancient Egypt and Babylonia, while similar phenomena showed
themselves in old Oriental lands, such as India and China.
§ 7. The Painting of Contour: Egypt and Babylonia.—In ancient Egypt we find this graphic delineation of natural objects, so spontaneous and free among the hunter tribes, reduced to a system and carried out with certain well-established conventions. The chief of these was the almost universal envisagement in profile of the subject to be represented. Only in the case of subsidiary figures might a front or a back view or a three-quarter face be essayed. To bring the human figure into profile it was conventionalized, as fig. 7, Plate III., will show. The subject is an Egyptian of high rank, accompanied by his wife and son, fowling in the marshes of the Delta. It is part of a wall-painting from a tomb at Thebes dating about 1500 B.C. The head, it will be seen, is in profile, but the eye is drawn full-face. The shoulders are shown in front view, though by the outline of the breast, with its nipple, on the figure’s right, and by the position far to the right of the navel, an indication is given that the view here is three-quarters. At the hips the figure is again in profile, and this is the position also of the legs. It will be observed that the two feet have the big toe on the same side, a device to escape the necessity of drawing the four toes as seen in the outside view of a foot. As a rule the action of these figures is made as clear as possible, and they are grouped in such a way that each is clearly seen, so that a crowd is shown either by a number of parallel outlines each a little in advance of the other suggesting a row seen in slight obliquity, or else by parallel rows of figures on lines one above the other. Animals are treated in the same way in profile, save that oxen will show the two horns, asses the two ears, as in front view, and the legs are arranged so that all are seen.
Within these narrow limits the Egyptian artist achieved extraordinary success in the truthful rendering of nature as expressed in the contours of figures and objects. If the human form be always conventionalized to the required flatness, the draughtsman is keen to seize every chance of securing variety. He fastens on the distinctive traits of different races with the zeal of a modern ethnologist, and in the case of royal personages he achieves success in individual portraiture. Though he could not render varieties of facial expression, he made the action of the limbs express all it could. The traditional Egyptian gravity did not exclude humour, and some good caricatures have been preserved. Egyptian drawing of animals, especially birds (see fig. 7, Plate III.), has in its way never been surpassed, and the specific points of beasts are as keenly noted as the racial characteristics of human beings. Animals, domestic or wild, are given with their particular gait or pose or expression, and the accent is always laid on those features that give the suggestion of strength or swiftness or lithe agility which marks the species. The precision of drawing is just as great in the case of lifeless objects, and any set of early, carefully-executed, hieroglyphic signs will give evidence of an eye and hand trained to perfection in the simpler tasks of the graphic art.
The representation of scenes, as distinct from single figures or groups, was not wholly beyond the Egyptian artist’s horizon. His most ambitious attempts are the great battle-scenes of the period of the New Empire, when a Seti or a Rameses is seen driving before him a host of routed foemen. The king in his chariot with the rearing horses is firmly rendered in the severe conventional style, but the crowd of fugitives, on a comparatively minute scale, are not arranged in the original clear fashion in parallel rows, but are tumbled about in extraordinary confusion all over the field, though always on the one flat plane. By another convention objects that cannot be given in profile are sometimes shown in ground plan. Thus a tank with trees round it will be drawn square in plan and the trees will be exhibited as if laid out flat on the ground, pointing on each side outwards from the tank.
In Babylonia and Assyria the mud-brick walls of palaces were coated with thin stucco, and this was in the interior sometimes painted, but few fragments of the work remain. On the exterior considerable use was made of decorative bands and panels of enamelled tiles, in which figure subjects were prominent, as we learn by the passage from Ezek. xxiii., about “men pourtrayed upon the wall, the images of the Chaldeans pourtrayed with vermilion.” The best idea of Assyrian graphic design is gained from the slabs carved in very low relief, which contain annalistic records of the acts of the king and his people in war and peace. The human figure is treated here in a less conventional scheme, but at the same time with less variety and in a less spirited and interesting fashion than in Egypt. Of animals far fewer species are shown, but in the portrayal of the nobler beasts, notably the horse, the lion and the mastiff, there is an element of true grandeur that we seldom find in Egyptian design. Furthermore, the carver of the reliefs had a better idea of giving the impression of a scene than his brother of the Nileland, and in his representations of armies marching and fighting he introduces rivers, hills, trees, groups of buildings and the like, all of course delineated without perspective, but in far truer and more telling fashion than is the case with the scenes from the campaigns of Egyptian conquerors.
§ 8. Painting in Pre-historic Greece.—A new chapter in the history of ancient painting was opened by the discovery of relics of the art in the palaces and tombs of the Mycenaean period on the coasts and islands of the Aegean. The charming naturalistic representations of marine plants and animals on the painted vases are quite unlike anything which later Greek art has to offer, and exhibit a decorative taste that reminds us a little of the Japanese. What we are concerned with, however, are rather the examples of wall-painting in plaster found at Tiryns and Mycenae and in Crete. Of the former the first to attract notice was the well-known bull from Tiryns, represented in profile and in action, and accompanied by a human figure; but of far greater importance, because foreshadowing an advance in the pictorial art, are certain wall-paintings discovered more recently by Dr Evans at Cnossos in Crete. The question is not of the single figures in the usual profile view, like the already celebrated “Cup-bearer,” however important these may be from the historical side, but of the so-called “miniature” wall-paintings that are now preserved in the museum at Candia, in which figures on a small scale are represented not singly but in crowds and in combination with buildings and landscape features that seem to carry us forward to far more advanced stages of the art of painting. To borrow a few sentences from Dr Arthur Evans’s account of them on their first discovery (Annual of British School at Athens, vi. 46): “A special characteristic of these designs is the outline drawing in fine dark lines. This outline drawing is at the same time combined with a kind of artistic shorthand brought about by the simple process of introducing patches of reddish brown or of white on which groups belonging to one or other sex are thus delineated. In this way the respective flesh-tints of a series of men or women are given with a single sweep of the brush, their limbs and features being subsequently outlined on the background thus obtained.” There is here, it is true, no perspective, but there is a distinct effort to give the general effect of objects in a mass, which corresponds curiously with the modern development of the art of painting called “impressionism.”
§ 9. The Painting of Form: Ancient Greece and Italy.—As
