Decorating The Walls Art, Reli
The decoration applied to the walls and ceilings of the royal tombs provided far more than a colourful patina, for the artists were in effect making an eternal world for the deceased king. The exigencies of tombs curtailed and hurried burials may have thwarted this goal on many occasions, but what the artists did achieve stands nonetheless among the greatest art of the ancient world.
The process by which these decorations were achieved is quite well understood. In some cases, though not all, draughtsmen laid out the representations using grids made by measuring rods and paint-covered strings snapped against the walls. The images and inscriptions were then applied in red paint outlines ...
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was used throughout several of the 19th-dynasty tombs, but usually only in the entrances of later monuments.
In the next stage, painters carefully filled in the reliefs and their backgrounds, applying their pigments by reflected sunlight near the entrances, and by the light of oil lamps deeper within the tombs. No more than six colours were commonly used in the Valley of the Kings – black, red, blue, yellow, green and white – but these were occasionally blended to create gradations and variations of hue and tone. In the early burials it seems that the decoration was applied only when the excavation had been completed and before the actual internment. In later burials, because of their larger size and more extensive decoration, construction and painting of the tomb seem to have gone side by side. Even here, stonecutters and painters probably took turns working so as to avoid jams in the confined spaces and damage to the freshly painted surfaces from airborne dust. Towards the end of ...
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early 18th dynasty, only the burial chamber received decoration – this taking the form of an unrolled papyrus of the Book of the Amduat, accurate in shape, colour and inscriptional style – but, from the time of Tuthmosis III, various deities were also shown on the walls of the antechamber and the well. In the 19th dynasty, decoration was carried into all parts of the tomb, and the idea that the axis of the tomb represented the sun’s east-west journey into the tomb (and its west-east return) seems to have been paramount.
From the time of Ramesses II on, the solar disc of Re containing the god’s morning and evening manifestations was placed above the entrance to the royal tombs. In ...
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"Decorating The Walls Art, Reli." Essayworld.com. August 18, 2008. Accessed April 25, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Decorating-The-Walls-Art-Reli/88515.
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