Towards The End Of The Ancient And At The Beginning Of The Christian
Era, Egypt, As We Know, Still Exercised
Such a fascination over the
world, by its ancestral prestige, by the memory of its dominating
past, and the sovereign
Permanence of its ruins, that it imposed its
gods upon its conquerors, its handwriting, its architecture, nay, even
its religious rites and its mummies. The Ptolemies built temples here,
which reproduce those of Thebes and Abydos. Even the Romans, although
they had already discovered the /vault/, followed here the primitive
models, and continued those granite ceilings, made of monstrous slabs,
placed flat, like our beams. And so this temple of Hathor, built
though it was in the time of Cleopatra and Augustus, on a site
venerable in the oldest antiquity, recalls at first sight some
conception of the Ramses.
If, however, you examine it more closely, there appears, particularly
in the thousands of figures in bas-relief, a considerable divergence.
The poses are the same indeed, and so too are the traditional
gestures. But the exquisite grace of line is gone, as well as the
hieratic calm of the expressions and the smiles. In the Egyptian art
of the best periods the slender figures are as pure as the flowers
they hold in their hands; their muscles may be indicated in a precise
and skilful manner, but they remain, for all that, immaterial. The god
Amen himself, the procreator, drawn often with an absolute crudity,
would seem chaste compared with the hosts of this temple.
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