Why does ancient Egypt's distinctive art style make everything look flat? | Hacker News Reader

Why does ancient Egypt's distinctive art style make everything look flat?

livescience.com

45 pointsprismatic18 comments

One thing I don't see the article mentioning is how rigid Egyptian culture and society was from 3000 BC up to the time of Alexander the Great.

The Narmer palette is the classic example of how the artistic style sprung up almost fully formed in just a few hundred years. After that, it all was just minor variations on the same theme.

It's similar to how many modern banks or courthouses have greek columns: when there is cultural continuity, some styles just live on after they reached maturity until the entire culture is wiped out.

Those Greek columns are themselves cribbed from Ancient Egyptian columns which are reproductions in stone of the bundled papyrus stalk columns that they used for support of their mud brick buildings.

> It's similar to how many modern banks or courthouses have greek columns: when there is cultural continuity, some styles just live on after they reached maturity until the entire culture is wiped out.

Or perhaps, if one "purpose" of Art is to reach some aesthetic "perfection", where/when form and purpose reach a common maximum, then there is no need to even try to "improve" anything anymore.

Perhaps that’s how banks and the justice system view art. Two pillars of society that are perfect just the way they are.

Ancient Egyptian art was intentionally abstract. It has been called "conceptual" rather than "perceptual" in style. Figures were flattened to provide an abstraction of their most salient features, not because the artists didn't understand perspective.

Incidentally, this style came back into fashion for a few centuries in Middle Ages Europe. You can see many examples in tapestries and illuminated manuscripts.

If you are curious about Ancient Egyptian culture, these two books have mostly excellent articles.

A Companion to Ancient Egyptian Art (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17073753-a-companion-to-...)

A Companion to Ancient Egypt (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8561459-a-companion-to-a...)

2d is what you get if you see the entire scene from very far away, for example the stars where thought to be on a fixed shell.

But who is very far away, but can see everything? Clearly the gods.. By making the images the way they do elevates the humans who see them to gods.

They used an art technique called fullest aspect (I think). Many of ancient Egypt's figures flatten both the front and the side views into the same figure. I think that is what you are referring to.

The “Egyptian history” book I’m reading with my kid states that the “Egyptians couldn’t draw perspective and therefore flattened everything” and continues with that this is the reason we see multi storied houses in drawing but not in archeological finds.

Does this ring a bell or is it just elementary school oversimplification again?

Well, the article linked to implies that the reason for the flat aspect of the artwork was that they were more interested in strongly conveying themes and concepts than they were reproducing what the eye sees. The article compares it to a modern comic strip. Whether they "couldn't" draw perspective, or were just uninterested, I don't know. I believe it was the Greeks in the 6th(?) century BC who were the first to use linear perspective in their art.

Do elementary school kids even understand what perspective is?

Kids aren't idiots, they just had too little time to learn everything. I've had perspective drawing in art classes in elementary school and nobody had problems understanding it after 10 minute introduction.

Have you seen the willy coyote cartoon with a road painted on a rock? It uses perspective, and kids aged 7 understand what happens.

> Kids aren't idiots, they just had too little time to learn everything.

These are wise words right there.

I don't know if you're punning or serious here.

If you're serious, you can teach elementary school kids to draw with perspective.

If my memory of carrying around a book on the subject during my family’s visit to Washington, DC during the Bicentennial is accurate, I had learnt some basics of perspective drawing at the age of five.

Yes. Not unusual for a first grader to have a basic understanding of it. Naming 3d shapes (pyramids, cylinders, cubes) is kindergarten level stuff.

Some of them do, some of them don't. I think I first learned about it in 3rd grade or so.

Reeks of oversimplification and hand-waving explanations. The Egyptians clearly understood very advanced geometry and methods to measure the world.

Everything the Egyptians did was intentional.

How could they build statues if they could only reason in 2d space? That makes no sense.

In a way many of their creations are a combination of spacetime(3d and time) accompanied by 2d storytelling as a form of narrative much like we write on the internet except maybe more comic book like.

That sounds reasonable. Until the rules of perspective were understood, artists were mostly quite poor at drawing realistic scenes. It wasn't until 1415 that the rules of perspective were thoroughly described, and the discovery dramatically improved the quality of art that was created after.

http://www.essentialvermeer.com/technique/perspective/histor...

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