The limestone statue above is the work of the first dynasty in Egypt. The eagle represents the patron saint of the royal family, and the snake represents the king of the dynasty. A king symbolized by a snake can safely sit on the throne of the palace because of the protection of the eagle god in the sky, which is similar to the meaning that the ancient emperor of China called the son of heaven.
This stone tablet can be said to illustrate one thing in the form of plane relief, so its shape is very simplified, and it has the embryonic form of hieroglyphics, which can also be associated with the hieroglyphics on Egyptian stone tablets later. Western art usually starts from Egypt.
What is style? In the field of fine arts, the long-term search for accurate and consistent expression methods has formed a "style". Egypt is one of the earliest civilizations that formed "style" in human fine arts.
Portraits in Egypt often choose hard stones, such as granite or crystal sandstone. Pay attention to the integrity of the whole volume when carving. Most portraits are upright or sitting, with their feet together and their sides absolutely symmetrical, creating an eternal aesthetic feeling.
A tomb built by Ramses II belongs to the era of the new king. There are four huge portraits carved at the entrance, which has a solemn, correct and disciplined beauty. This is the most typical style of Egyptian portrait art, which has dominated the history of Egypt for two thousand years. It was not until Greek culture sprouted in the Aegean Sea that the influence of Egyptian aesthetics slowly shifted, and western art also moved from the Nile valley to the northern Mediterranean.
Three forms of Egyptian painting:
Line carving-that is, depicting people or animals on stones, these images are all planar shapes. Actually, it is an artistic style between sculpture and painting.
Pictograph-This kind of writing originally used a symbol to represent an object, and each symbol was an independent painting.
The main feature of ancient Egyptian art is the sense of constancy. It is hoped that through the traction of constancy, art will form a medium between man and mysterious forces.
Divide the picture with horizontal lines; Picture composition arranges people and things in a straight line, and the size of characters depends on their level and distance.
Hieroglyphs gradually developed from symbols representing a physical object to cognition, and kept pictographs all the time. They draw the images of people, animals and plants vividly one by one, and match them on the background of pictures or reliefs, which plays the role of "inscription" in Chinese painting and also plays a decorative role in the pictures. It can be seen that ancient Egyptians also regarded calligraphy as an art.
Characteristics of relief murals in ancient Egypt;
1. forehead method: indicates that the head, eyes, shoulders and waist of a character are front;
2. Horizontal banded arrangement structure, divided by horizontal lines;
3. Arrange the proportion and composition position according to the rank of the characters;
4. Filling method, the picture is full, leaving no blank; 5. Color fixing procedure: male skin is brown, female skin is light brown or light yellow, hair is blue-black, and eyes are black.