The Antiquities of Orissa v1.c9.94

v1.c9.94

This uniformity, rigidity, and absence of nature and life which characterise the bas-reliefs, may likewise be noticed in the statues of Egypt. Page after page may be turned of the whole series of the ponderous tomes³⁴ of the savants who accompanied Napoleon the Great in his Egyptian expedition, without encountering a single human figure which has any life, expression, or action—any dignity, grace, or ease—about it; or is other than a stiff, formal, rude imitation of nature. The cause of this may be partly due to the law referred to by Plato which forbade the artists to depart, in the slightest degree, in the execution of statues of the human form from the type consecrated by priestly authority, but it implies likewise a primitive state of art, and want of appreciation of, or inability to develop, the beauty of nature in stone. True it is, as justly remarked by Plato, "that the pictures and statues made ten thousand years ago are in no one particular better or worse than what they now make." The statues may be colossal in size, and vast in number, and, for the time when they were sculptured, highly creditable to the nation which made them; but they are neither natural nor beautiful.