Ancient Egyptian & Greek Art

This paper compares ancient Egyptian art with ancient Greek art and considers the ways in which the Greeks were influenced by Egyptian art. Egypt established a long and enduring artistic tradition. Greek art drew heavily on that background, using many of the same kinds of subjects and incorporating many similar symbols, but then reinterpreted them through very different eyes and a strikingly different cultural perception. Both visions continue to have a profound impact on artists in modern cultures, from their representation of everyday life to the varied perceptions of the importance and meaning life in general.

Catharine Roehrig, Egyptian Art Curator for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, observes, "Egypt's Old Kingdom (Dynasties 3-6, ca. 2649-2150 B.C.) was one of the most dynamic periods in the development of Egyptian art. During this period, artists learned to express their culture's worldview, creating for the first time images and forms that endured for generations" (1). According to Roehrig, Egpytian art served two primary functions, "to ensure an ordered existence and to defeat death by preserving life into the next world" (1).

The artistic style developed to serve these functions is graphically bold, visually striking, and intensely stylized. It uses balance and symmetry, multiple points of view within a single work, scale (often employed to show the relative societal importance of the figures depicted), and naturalistic details. Egyptian art aims at a un

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t al, note: The Greeks had adopted the outward appearance of the erect male figure from the Egyptians. But in their free pose that dispenses with any outside support, the vigorous tension of the limbs and the coherence of all the parts within the framework of a closed whole, the early Greek youths are essentially different from any Egyptian work. They are purely Greek, the earliest no less than the later (15). The distinction lies not only in the artistic styles used to express similar forms but also in the inherent cultural differences between the two societies. As Carpenter writes, "Just as there could be no distinction between Greek secular and religious art, so too there could be no diversion of art to magical or mystical purposes, as in Egypt and elsewhere" (18). Many Egyptian sculptural figures were designed for funerary purposes, to accompany the dead into the afterlife, or to chronicle the connections between this life and the next. Even depictions of important, specific people were usually not attempts to reconstruct the individual being portrayed but were instead more general representations of the human form. Carpenter argues, "To a Greek mind such memorial images could not have possessed any of the magical

Category: Arts - A