Egyptian art kept the same basic rules for nearly three thousand years. Learn the rules and you can read any Egyptian painting or relief.
- Composite view. Each part of the body is shown from its clearest angle: the head in profile, but the eye drawn as if from the front; the shoulders from the front; the hips, legs and feet in profile.
- Hierarchical scale. Size shows importance. A king or a god is drawn larger than the people around him.
- Registers. Scenes are stacked in horizontal bands, each with its own ground line, read like lines of text.
- The grid. Artists laid out figures on a grid of squares so that proportions came out the same. A standing figure was 18 squares from the soles of the feet to the hairline.
Key idea
Why it works
Looking closely: The Weighing of the Heart. The scene reads left to right like a strip. Hunefer, in a white pleated robe, is led in by the jackal-headed god Anubis. In the middle, his heart is weighed on a great scale against a feather; the ibis-headed god Thoth writes down the result, and a beast waits below the scale. The heart balances, so the falcon-headed god Horus leads Hunefer to Osiris on his throne. Every figure stands on a firm ground line, every outline is clear, and the flat colors are keyed: white robes, green and blue for the gods. Hieroglyphs fill the spaces and label the scene. Above, a second register shows Hunefer kneeling before the gods.
Worked example: Read the figure
- A profile eye is a small sideways wedge, hard to read.
- A frontal eye is the clearest view of an eye.
- The artist chose the clearest view of each part: this is composite view, on purpose.
Answer: No: it is composite view, the clearest view of each part.
Common mistake