The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5

During his long and intimate acquaintance with Egypt, M. Ernest Feydeau, who is not only an archæologist but also a poet, after he had sounded the mysteries of the old kingdom of the Pharaohs, became passionately attached to that art which the Greek ideal – which nevertheless is indebted to it for more than one lesson – has caused us to despise too much. He has understood, both as a painter and a sculptor, a beauty which is so different from our own standard and which is yet so real.

Hathor, the Egyptian Venus, seems to him as beautiful as the Venus of Milo. Without entirely sharing that feeling, I confess to admiring greatly the clean outline, so pure, so slender, and so full of life. In spite of the hieratic restrictions which did not allow the consecrated attitude to be varied, art shows out in more than one direction. There is a beauty of a strange and penetrating charm foreign to our own habits in the heads with their delicate profiles, their great eyes made larger by the use of antimony, the somewhat thick lips with their faint, dreamy pout, or their vague smile resembling that of the sphinx, in the rounded cheeks upon which hang broad discs of gold, in the brows shaded by lotus flowers, in the temples framed in by the narrow tresses of the hair, powdered with blue powder, which are shown in funeral processions. How youthful, how fresh, how pure are the tall, slender bodies, the swelling bosoms, the supple waists, the narrow hips of these dancers and musicians who beat time with their long, slender fingers and their long, narrow feet. The Etruscans themselves have never produced anything more light, more graceful, and more elegant upon the bodies of their finest vases, and in more than one famous Greek bas-relief can be recognised attitudes and gestures borrowed from the frescoes of the necropolis and the tombs of Egypt. It is from Egypt also that Greece took, while diminishing their huge size, its Doric and Ionic orders and its Corinthian capital, in which the acanthus takes the place of the lotus flower.