The architecture of Egypt was practised in a manner to show almost no historical development--with the sculpture this is the case in still greater degree. The most ancient carved remains, which with reasonable security may be assigned to the fifth dynasty, show the formal system, retained during the subsequent twenty centuries, as already perfected. Even at that early date the network of lines, which the Egyptian sculptors (more as mechanics than as artists) followed down to the time of the Ptolemies, was already calculated and introduced as a canon.
Besides figures of the gods, the sculpture of Egypt is rich in the images of kings, queens, and prominent subjects; and in such portraits the observation of the living model, of the peculiarities of character which lead to the differences of exterior appearance, would seem to be a natural consequence. But as the individual disappeared in the mass of the Egyptian people, so the appreciation of individuality was almost wholly lacking in the Egyptian artist. Sculptors and painters worked without the least desire for pre-eminence in ability and distinction, without thought of perpetuating their names, and the work they produced expressed these faults. As Brunn truly remarks, we can look upon whole rows of Egyptian sculptures without a question ever arising in our minds as to the authorship of this or that work, without observing that one is superior to the others, or that any were much above manufactures. The work became what the artist felt himself personally to be--a mere link in a monotonous chain. The result of this is that the statues generally represent an entirely abstract human being--not an absolute ideal, for that can hardly be said to exist in any art, but a type of the Egyptian race, well understood and unalterably repeated. As soon as the art had to a certain degree mastered the normal appearance of the human body, it contented itself therewith and came to a standstill. The peculiarities in the living model or in the attributed characters of the deities were rarely considered by the artist, who only distinguished by attributes what should be otherwise expressed; he did not attempt to show the effect of the mind upon the outer being, and thus to give to sculpture its true importance.