#1648749 IADES - 2021 - Diplomata (Terceiro Secretário)

Text 7 to answer question.

It is one of the greatest things in Egyptian art that all the statues, paintings and architectural forms seem to fall into place as if they obeyed one law. We call such a law, which all creations of a people seem to obey, a “style”. The rules which govern all Egyptian art give every individual work the effect of poise and austere harmony.

The Egyptian style comprised a set of very strict laws, which every artist had to learn from his earliest youth. Seated statues had to have their hands on their knees; men had to be painted with darker skin than women; the appearance of every god was strictly laid down. Every artist also had to learn the art of beautiful script. He had to cut the images and symbols of the hieroglyphs clearly and accurately in stone. But once he had mastered all these rules he had finished his apprenticeship. No one wanted anything different, no one asked him to be “original”. On the contrary, he was probably considered the best artist who could make his statues most like the admired monuments of the past. So it happened that in the course of three thousand years or more art changed very little. Everything that wasconsidered good and beautiful in the age of the pyramids was held to be just as excellent a thousand years later. Granted, new fashions appeared, and new subjects were demanded of the artists, but their mode of representing man and nature remained essentially the same.

Only one man ever shook the iron bars of the Egyptian style. He was a king of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Amenophis IV, a heretic. He broke with many of the customs hallowed by age-old tradition. He did not wish to pay homage to the many strangely shaped gods of his people. For him only one god was supreme, Aten, whom he worshipped and whom he had represented in the shape of the sun-disk sending down its rays, each one endowed with a hand. He called himself Akhnaten, after his god, and he moved his court out of reach of the priests of the other gods.

The pictures that he commissioned must have shocked the Egyptians of his day by their novel character. In them none of the solemn and rigid dignity of the earlier Pharaohs was to be found. Instead, he had himself depicted lifting his daughter on to his knee, walking with his wife Nefertiti in the garden, leaning on a stick, beneath the blessing sun. Some of his portraits show him as an ugly man; perhaps he wanted the artists to portray him in all his human frailty. Akhnaten’s successor was Tutankhamun, whose tomb with its treasures was discovered in 1922. Some of these works are still in the modern style of the Aten religion. The back of the king’s throne shows the king and queen in a homely idyll. He is sitting on his chair in an attitude which might have appalled the strict conservative – almost lolling, by Egyptian standards. His wife is no smaller than he is, and gently puts her hand on his shoulder while the Sun-god again is stretching his hands in blessing down to them.

Gombrich, E. H. The Story of Art. Phaidon, 16th. Ed. 1995. pp.65-6, with adaptations.

Based on the text, mark the following item a right (C) or wrong (E).

In the fragment “no one asked him to be ‘original’” , the underlined word is in inverted commas because originality, as we know it today, did not exist in Egyptian art.