The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt: The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5Gautier, Théophile
General
The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt: The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5
Gautier, Théophile
Egypt -- Antiquities -- Fiction; Egypt -- Description and travel
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.
[Transcriber's Note:
The following spelling and punctuation errors have been corrected:
Page 9: " has been added before "I." ("I have a presentiment that)
Page 46: ' was removed before "Amset." (the man's head of Amset)
Page 232: A period was added after "foot." (would disdain to set foot.)
Page 246: "Taia" changed to "Taia." (Twea, Taia, Amense,)
Page 349: "forty-twa" changed to "forty-two." (Osiris and the forty-two
judges,)
All other inconsistencies have been retained.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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