Egyptian sculpture

16 EGYPTIAN SCULPTURE

to further work in figures, he was, of course, instructed in the canon of the period. There seems no doubt that the inscriptions and relief sculptures of statues were first drawn by the artist and then were carried out up to a certain point by advanced students, and finished by the master. Numerous trial pieces remain to show the methods by which the student advanced from one stage to another (Pl. IV. 1). The schools of art were often, in the New Kingdom at any rate, held in the temples, as these always showed the best examples of art; plaster casts also were made of various details of statues, such as eyes, necklaces, cartouches, and of special hieroglyphs, for the use of the budding artist.

When drawing, the first sketch was made in red, as this was the colour which showed less than others (Pl. IV. 2). It must be remembered that there was no possibility of rubbing out a wrong line; a line once put in had to remain. The consequence was that the Egyptian artist became a master of line; for as there was no possibility of altering a mistake, his line had to be sure and clearly defined—he had to know what he wished to represent. In correcting the first drait, the corrections were made with a fine, black line. Various devices were in use for hiding mistakes: in sculpture, wrong lines might sometimes be removed by cutting them away; in painting, the lines could be covered with thick paint; and it is only when the paint has worn off, or in unfinished sketches, that the method is clearly visible. Occasionally the artist has altered the whole figure, covering the original sketch with paint or removing as far as possible the original figure in relief sculpture. One noticeable example of a mistake made in relief sculpture is in the tomb-chapel of User-Neter, at Saqqara. In one of these scenes a subsidiary figure was originally made too small, perhaps intentionally so; it had then been increased in size, with the result that