Ancient Egyptian Paintings

The first known human civilization is Egypt with a style of high art. This art stylefollows a strange habit but an awesome, they are very consistent, which is wherethe feet and the head of each figure is depicted from the side, while the body,shoulders, arms and eyes is depicted from the front. This suggests that the art style of artists at that time able to paint the subject with the easiest point of view.This is an art style that is easy and is used in painting or sculpture.

Paintings on Egyptian tombs and temples usually depict events that will be experienced during the journey of the dead into the next world. Practical purposeof this painting is to provide details in the sacred journey after death, in the form of images and hieroglyphs. In the great temple of Ramses II at Thebes, for example,one painting shows the queen Nefertari, gently taken his life by the goddess Isis.The inscription mentions the words issued by Isis: "Come to the Great QueenNefertari, beloved of Mut, without sin. I'll show you a place in the world of the sacred. "

Paintings that decorated the walls of the tombs in Egypt were intended to keep alive the history. The pictures and models found in Egyptian tombs were connected with the idea of providing the soul with helpmates in the other world. These wall-paintings provide in extraordinarily vivid picture of life as it was lived in Egypt thousands of years ago. And yet, looking at the art for the first time, may find rather look strange. What mattered most was not prettiness but completeness. It was the artists' task to preserve everything as clearly and permanently as possible. So they did not set out to sketch nature as it appeared to them from any fortuitous angle. They drew from memory, according to strict rules which ensured that everything that had to go into the picture would stand out in perfect clarity.

Under the Empire the tombs became a riot of painting. The Egyptian artist had now developed every color in the rainbow, and was anxious to display his skill.

On the walls and ceilings of homes, temples, palaces and graves hetried to portray refreshingly the life of the sunny fields birds in flight through the air, fishes swimming in the sea, beasts of the jungle in their native haunts.

Floors were painted to look like transparent pools, and ceilings sought to rival the jewelry of the sky.

Around these pictures were borders of geometric or floral design, ranging from a quiet simplicity to the most fascinating complexity.

The "Dancing Girl," so full of orig inality and esprit, the "Bird Hunt in a Boat," the slim, naked beauty in ochre, mingling with other musicians in the Tomb of Nakht at Thebes these are stray samples of the painted population of the graves.

Here, as in the bas-reliefs, the line is good and the composition poor; the participants in an action, whom we should portray as intermingled, are represented separately in succession;2 superposition is again preferred to perspective;

the stiff formalism and conventions of Egyptian sculpture are the order of the day, and do not reveal that enlivening humor and realism which distinguish the later statuary.

But through these pictures runs a freshness of conception, a flow of line and execution, a fidelity to the life and movement of natural things, and a joyous exuberance of color and ornament, which make them a delight to the eye and the spirit.

With all its shortcomings Egyptian painting would never be surpassed by any Oriental civilization until the middle dynasties of China.

Many similar paintings are also found buried in a papyrus manuscript known as the Book of Death - was introduced to the New Kingdom from the 16th century BC