Introduction to World Art
Senior 1 · Fine Arts
Introduction to World Art
Lesson 2 of 5
25 min
About 4,000 years ago, an official named Mentuwoser paid for this carved stone slab, called a stela, to be set up at Abydos, a holy city beside the Nile. Look at the large seated man. Is his head seen from the side or from the front? His eye? His shoulders? His feet?
Worked example
Reading an artwork: the stela of Mentuwoser
Step 1. What you see. A large man seated on a chair at the lower left, facing right towards a table of offerings. Smaller figures stand and kneel on the right, in rows. The top two-thirds is filled with hieroglyphs in neat columns.
Step 2. How it is made. The figures are carved in low relief on limestone and painted: men's skin in red-brown, as was the custom. Each figure combines views: head in profile, eye and shoulders from the front, legs and feet from the side. The rows of smaller figures stand on ground lines, like the lines of a page.
Step 3. What it means. The stela was meant to keep Mentuwoser's name and needs alive for ever. The offerings on the table were believed to feed his spirit, and the text asked passers-by to say a prayer for him. He is the largest figure because he is the most important: size shows rank, not distance.
Definition
Composite view: an Egyptian convention in which each part of the body is shown from its clearest angle (head in profile, eye and shoulders from the front, legs from the side) and joined into one figure.
Hierarchical scale: showing important people larger than less important ones, whatever their real size or distance.
Definition
Register: a horizontal band or row in which figures stand on a shared ground line. Relief: carving in which figures stand out from (or are cut into) a flat background, like a coin.
Canon of proportions: a fixed set of measurements for drawing the human body. Example: the Egyptian grid of 18 squares from the soles of the feet to the hairline.
Egyptian artists worked for more than 3,000 years, from about 3100 to 30 BCE, and their style changed remarkably little. Most art was made for temples and tombs, to serve the gods and the dead, so it had to be clear and unchanging rather than new. Artists learned a set of rules, including a grid for drawing people (Figure 1).
Worked example: using the Egyptian grid
Gatete wants to draw an Egyptian-style figure whose hairline is 36 cm above the ground line. How big is each square, and where do the knee and shoulders go?
Square size: 18 squares must fit into 36 cm, so
Knee: 6 squares up, so above the ground line. Shoulders: 16 squares up, so .
Because every figure is built on the same grid, a figure drawn by one artist matches a figure drawn by another, even hundreds of years apart.
Greek art, from about 800 to 31 BCE, moved in a different direction. Greek artists studied the real body closely and tried to show it as perfectly balanced and beautiful: an ideal. Early standing statues, from around 600 BCE, stand stiffly with one foot forward, rather like Egyptian statues. By about 480 BCE sculptors had learned to show a figure resting its weight on one leg, so that hips and shoulders tilt and the body seems relaxed and alive; this pose is called contrapposto. Greek builders designed temples such as the Parthenon in Athens (447–432 BCE) using three styles of column, called orders.
In Athens, potters and painters decorated jars for oil, wine and water. Look at these two jars, painted about fifty years apart.
| Ancient Egypt | Ancient Greece | |
|---|---|---|
| Main purpose | temples and tombs: serving gods and the dead | temples, public places and homes: honouring gods, heroes and athletes |
| How people are shown | composite view, stiff and formal, same rules for centuries | studied from life; idealised; relaxed poses (contrapposto) |
| Size | hierarchical scale: important people are bigger | natural sizes |
| Typical media | painted relief on stone, wall painting, stone and wood statues | marble and bronze statues, painted pottery, stone temples |
| Example | Stela of Mentuwoser, about 1944 BCE | Berlin Painter's hydria, about 490 BCE |
Definition
Black-figure: a Greek vase-painting technique in which figures are painted black on the orange clay and details are scratched through. Red-figure: the reverse, with the background painted black and the figures left in the colour of the clay, details painted on with a fine brush.
Order (in architecture): a style of column with its own capital, shaft and base: Doric, Ionic or Corinthian.
<em>Making Greek Vases</em>, from the Getty Museum. Watch how the pot is thrown on the wheel, how the black is painted on with a slip of fine clay, and how the three stages of firing turn it black and orange.
Tip
Egypt: rules and rank. Greece: life and balance. For vases: black-figure = black people on orange; red-figure = orange people on black. In the exam, point to one visible feature to prove which is which.
Warning
A common mistake: saying Egyptian artists “could not draw properly”. They could: the composite view was a deliberate choice, so that every part of a person was shown clearly and completely for eternity. Judge an artwork by what its makers were trying to do.
Practice
Describe the composite view, naming which parts are shown in profile and which from the front.
In an Egyptian scene, a king is twice as tall as the soldiers beside him. What convention is this, and what does it tell you?
An Egyptian-style figure is drawn on a grid with squares of 1.5 cm. How high is the hairline, and how high is the elbow (12 squares)?
How can you tell a black-figure vase from a red-figure vase?
Name the three Greek column orders and one feature of each.
Compare how the Mentuwoser stela and the Berlin Painter's hydria show people. Give two differences and one similarity.
1. The head, legs and feet are in profile (side view); the eye and the shoulders are shown from the front. The parts are joined into one figure, each from its clearest angle.
2. Hierarchical scale: the king is the most important person, so he is drawn largest, whatever his real size.
3. Hairline: . Elbow: .
4. Black-figure: black figures on an orange background, with details scratched in. Red-figure: orange figures on a black background, with details painted in black lines.
5. Doric: plain cushion capital, no base. Ionic: scroll (volute) capital, with a base. Corinthian: capital of acanthus leaves, with a base.
6. Differences: Mentuwoser follows the composite view, while Ajax and Achilles are drawn more naturally, bending in a real pose; Mentuwoser is shown larger than the others because of rank, while the two heroes are the same size. Similarity: both show people from the side against a plain background, with little or no landscape, and both use a ground line.
Sources and credits
