. A history of art in ancient Egypt . Fig. 38.—Painted bas-relief. Boulakby Bourgoin.) (Di-a\vn or at least its attribute, and the head or body, as the casemight be, was detached in order to form part of a complex andimaginary being. The special characteristics of the animal madeuse of were so frankly insisted upon that no confusion couldarise between one deity and another. Even a child could notfail to see the difference between Sekhet, with the head of a cator a lioness, and Hathor, with that of a cow. We do not refuse to accept this explanation, but yet we mayexpress our surprise that the E
. A history of art in ancient Egypt . Fig. 38.—Painted bas-relief. Boulakby Bourgoin.) (Di-a\vn or at least its attribute, and the head or body, as the casemight be, was detached in order to form part of a complex andimaginary being. The special characteristics of the animal madeuse of were so frankly insisted upon that no confusion couldarise between one deity and another. Even a child could notfail to see the difference between Sekhet, with the head of a cator a lioness, and Hathor, with that of a cow. We do not refuse to accept this explanation, but yet we mayexpress our surprise that the Egyptians, who were able, even in The Egyptian Religion and the Plastic Arts. 59 the days of the ancient empire, to endow the statues of their kingswith so much purity and nobihty of form, were not disgusted bythe strangeness of such combinations, by their extreme grotesque-ness, and by the disagreeable results which they sometimesproduced. A certain beauty may be found in such creations as. Fig. 39.—Sekhet. Louvre. (Granite. Height 0*50 metre?.) the Sphinx, and a few others, in which the human face is allied tothe wings of a bird, and the trunk and posterior membersof the most graceful and powerful of quadrupeds. But could anynotion be more unhappy than that of crowning the bust of a man 6o A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. or woman with the ugly and ponderous head of a crocodile, or with the slender neck and flat head of a snake ? Every polytheistic nation attackedthis problem in turn, and each solvedit in its own manner. The Hindoosmultiplied the human figure by itself,and painted or carved their gods withthree heads and many pairs of armsand legs, of which proceeding tracesare to be found among the WesternAsiatics, the Greeks, and even theLatins. The Greeks represented alltheir gods in human form, and yet bythe delicacy of their contours and thegeneral coherence of their character-ization, they were enabled to avoid allconfusion between them. With them,too, costume
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