As the desire to decorate tomb and temple walls developed, the need to lay out iconic scenes on walls increased. Instead of placing separate icons on a single undifferentiated surface, the walls were divided by groundlines and vertical scene markers. Content connections were implied through the physical relationships of the icons, but narration of an event was limited to linking scenes visually and with text, similar to comic book story-telling. Gay Robins has pointed out that the square grid did not exist until the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, but that guidelines were used to proportion figures, both for painting and for relief work in the Old Kingdom, with certainty from the Fifth Dynasty onward (Robins 1994). Her analysis of early dynastic figures indicates a lack of standardization through the Third Dynasty, but she also noted that royal figures representing King Djoser were nearly identical to the classical proportions seen throughout the remainder of the Old Kingdom. The masterful painting in the tomb of Itet, dating to the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty, must have required the use of both horizontal and vertical guidelines, although they are not now visible. Yet the wall paintings from the tomb of Metjetji, dating to the late Fifth or early Sixth Dynasty, preserve these guidelines very well as part of the undersketches (Arnold and Ziegler 1999). As Robins’ work has indicated, Egyptian artists divided the human body mathematically from very early on, perhaps as early as the First Dynasty, and wall surfaces were likewise laid out with these proportions in mind. Indeed, the development of figural proportions as part of wall planning is what separates Hierakonpolis tomb 100 from the Meidum paintings and from the limestone paste-filled reliefs.
During the archaic era, as the canonical forms of Egyptian art developed, painting developed with it. The two primary functions of painting were coloring and drawing. By the Third Dynasty traditional colors were used for skin colors (red for males and yellow or pale pink for females), hair (black and blue), clothing, and a variety of offering objects. The tomb of Hesyre has painted panels representing both geometrically painted textiles and funerary objects, while the statue of Djoser was painted, as later, with an overall white ground color, over which was layered black pigment for hair and beard, red for skin color, and additional white for the festival robe. In the early Fourth Dynasty tombs at Meidum, large wall scenes were designed combining painted plaster over mud brick with sunken relief compartments carved in limestone and filled with pigment paste. One of the tomb owners, Nefermaat, boasted in an inscription that, ‘‘he made his images in drawing that cannot be erased,’’ apparently referring to the pigment filled relief (Smith 1949; Arnold and Ziegler 1999). The materials used for the pigment paste were those used in painting throughout Pharaonic Egypt and were bound with water and resin. The hues included black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, and gray (Pages-Camagna 1998; Arnold and Ziegler 1999). As has frequently been said, the irony was that the technique was largely unsuccessful, since after the liquid in the paste dried, the pigment contracted and fell out of the stone compartments. Yet, the esthetic taste conveyed by the Nefermaat and Itet tombs was for highly colored but smooth wall scenes, similar to painted plaster alone. Indeed, the intricacy of the mud-plaster paintings in these tombs demonstrates the artists’ recognition of the medium’s capacity to convey visual information. Wall painting appears to have been developed on mud brick surfaces, and the carefully proportioned and intricately detailed paintings from the tombs of Itet and Nefermaat must represent the apogee of early dynastic murals on mud brick walls. Yet, through most of the Old Kingdom, elite monument builders privileged painted relief sculpture over painted plaster, just as they privileged stone over mud brick for construction.
The interrelationship between relief sculpture and wall painting is significant, since the same artists may well have carried out both of these techniques of decoration. The role of painting, however, is different from that of sculpture, where it pertains particularly to color. The addition of color, separate from line art, created a covering for the images on the wall, and in the best preserved Old Kingdom painted relief, the paint is thick and nearly obscures the relief itself. Because the craftsman sketched the scenes on the walls before carving or painting, these under-sketches and the guidelines used to proportion the scenes needed to be covered over. Background paint was used for this purpose, and it was a part of every wall scene, although frequently it has been lost over the centuries. The background paint for the tombs of Nefermaat and Itet was gray in color and can still be seen on the mud-plaster paintings from those tombs. In later Old Kingdom tombs, such as those of Mehu and Metjetji, the background paints were also gray, but with blue added in. Background paints combining blue and gray were common in most periods of Pharaonic Egypt, sometimes in a dark hue, and at other times in a much lighter one that resembled sky color (D’Amicone and Vigna 1998). Although nearly all tombs have lost some or much oftheir original coloring, the banquet scene from the tomb ofMehu, dating to the Sixth Dynasty, is an example of how pervasive the coloring was (Altenmuller 1998). Likewise, the marsh scene in the tomb of Ti, despite the loss of color on the fish in the water, also shows the heavy layering of paint across the wall. One tomb in which most of the paint has remained on the wall is that of Pepiankh Heryib, called Heny, at Meir (Blackman 1924: IV) (plates 11-12). This large relief painted tomb in the Old Kingdom D cemetery consists of several rooms and family chapels, in addition to a burial chamber and a partially decorated serdab. The scenes of Heny emphasized his activities: observing preparations for his own tomb (first chamber), fishing and fowling, viewing agriculture from a carrying chair, viewing animals, brewing, and shipping (hall). In the large pillared hall other family members and their false doors are included in more static scenes, lending more importance to the role of Heny as provider and family pillar. In the burial chamber Heny’s priests appear reciting the rituals, while the deceased’s funerary boat is centered over the burial pit.
The background color on the walls of Pepiankh’s tomb is dark blue grey, similar to that of Mehu, and it is applied thickly. The red skin color on the male figures was also layered heavily, and, where it is not worn away, the paint nearly removes the appearance of the relief sculpture. In the front chamber a large seated figure of the tomb owner faces a doorway observing artisans at work as they create statues and cult objects for his own burial (O’Connor 1996). The tomb of Pepiankh, called Heny, has recently been cleaned so that the colors can be far better appreciated, although in the inner hall there is still a great deal of concretized mud on surfaces. Nonetheless, the tomb’s palette abounds in blue, red, and white, with a lesser amount of yellow (most often used to indicate gold) and green/blue, which is still recognizable in the marsh scenes and on the garment of the tomb owner’s wife whose tiny image stands before him as he gazes at the marsh (D’Amicone and Vigna, 1998; Lee and Quirke 2000; Green, 2001). The black used to color wigs and short hair styles is frequently faded, but, when well preserved, it shows a great similarity to the background color, which is a dark blue gray. It may be that both the hair and the background paint combined black and blue in differing amounts. The overall visual impression in the tomb is of richly colored images more than of painted sculpture. The result, surprisingly in agreement with the inscription from the tomb of Itet, is of ‘‘images that cannot be erased’’, doubly produced by the layers of paint and the stone surfaces beneath.
The tomb of Pepiankh, called Heny, also well illustrates the second major function of painting: the creation of image via drawn line. Egyptian two-dimensional art was characteristically finished by outlining the colored images, but it was also produced by covering line sketches with paint before the final drawings were done. The draftsmen
Figure 43.2 Meir. Tomb of Pepiankh. Serdab showing inked images of funerary rites atop red sketches. Photograph Courtesy the Author.
Laid out the walls scene-by-scene using carefully proportioned guidelines, and then drew the figures and objects into the scene, usually with red ink; the craftsmen then sculpted these scenes following the sketch lines. In Pepiankh’s burial chamber the sculptural work was left unfinished, and only the upper registers had been carved (figure 43.2). The remainder of the scenes, however, were outlined and carefully drawn in black ink using the underlying red guide lines. As Robins has noted, the figures were proportioned to eight sets of guidelines that properly positioned the standing figures at the bottom of the foot, midpoint of foot to knee, top of knee, bottom of the buttock, narrowest waist point, armpit, shoulder, and hairline (Robins 1994) (figure 43.3). Even internal details were added to define items such as geese and food offerings. These black drawn figures represented a means of completing the tomb scenes, since the representation with its discernible outline constituted the Egyptian notion of an image.
The serdab cut beneath the floor level within the burial chamber was decorated with rows of sunken relief representations of statues of the tomb owner, each filled with color. The outline of these images was created by the sunken carved edge, and the paint added a second layer of identification to the figures. The tomb of Pepiankh, called Heny, thus well represents all the ways in which drawing and painting combined to create and complete wall decoration.
Figure 43.3 Meir. Tomb of Pepiankh. Serdab showing the eight sets of guidelines proportioning figures. Photograph Courtesy the Author.
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