[170] The _serdabs_ of the tomb of Ti contained twenty, only one of which was recovered uninjured. MARIETTE, _Notice du Musée de Boulak_, No. 24.
Working under the impulse of such an idea, the sculptor could not fail to do his best to endow his statue with the characteristic features of the original. "It is easy, then, to understand why those Egyptian statues which do not represent gods are always portraits of some individual, executed with all the precision of which the artists were capable. They were not ideal figures to which the desire for beauty of line and expression had much to say, they were stone bodies, bodies which had to reproduce all the individual contours of their flesh-and-blood originals. When the latter was ugly, its reproduction had to be ugly also, and ugly in the same way. If these principles were disregarded the double would be unable to find the support which was necessary to it."[171]
[171] MASPERO, in Rayet's _Monuments de l'Art Antique_.
The first Egyptian statue was not so much a work of art as a cast from nature. If photography had been invented in the time of Menes, photographers would have made their fortunes in Egypt. Those sun-portraits, which are supposed to present a perfect resemblance, would have been put in the tomb of a deceased man in hundreds. Wanting such things, they were contented to copy his figure faithfully in stone or wood. His ordinary attitude, his features and costume, were imitated with such scrupulous sincerity that the serdabs were filled with faithful duplicates of himself. To obtain such a likeness the artist cannot have trusted to his memory. His employer must have sat before him, the stone body must have been executed in presence of him whose immortality it had to ensure. In no other way could those effigies have been produced whose iconic character is obvious at first sight, effigies to which a contemporary would have put a name without the slightest hesitation.
This individuality is not, however, equally well preserved in all Egyptian sculpture, a remark which applies to the early dynasties as well as to the later ones, though not in the same degree. In those early ages the beliefs which led the Egyptian to inclose duplicates of his own body in his last resting-place were more powerful over his spirit, and the artist had to exert himself to satisfy the requirements of his employers in the matter of fidelity. Again, those centuries had not to struggle against such an accumulation of precedents and fixed habits, in a word, against so much conventionality as those which came after. There were no formulæ, sanctioned by long custom, to relieve the artist from the necessity for original thought and continual reference to nature; he was compelled to make himself acquainted both with the general features of his race and those of his individual employers. This necessity gave him the best possible training. Portraiture taken up with intelligence and practised with a passionate desire for truth has always been the best school for the formation of masters in the plastic arts.